In this week's Off the Cuff podcast, Chris and Alasdair Macleod discuss:
- The Swiss gold referendum and the extraordinary lengths to which the Swiss National Bank is going to prevent its passage.
- The World Gold Council's bizarre under-reporting of Chinese gold demand
- Fuzzy numbers: GDP is both distorted and not representative of actual economic progress
- Russia moving toward putting the ruble under a gold standard?
- Provoking Russia. The aims of the west are not clear, probably because there's no real strategy in place.
There are very big movements happening in the world of physical gold, with the dutch somehow getting their 120+ tonnes of gold back from the US Federal Reserve over just three months while Germany continues to insist 5 tonnes over an entire year was reasonable. A major political figure in France has written a letter to the French central bank demanding that all French gold be repatriated while Russia's central bank continues to accumulate gold in preference for dollars.
Yet the price for physical gold remains stuck in a tight band between $1190 and $1200.
But what if Russia is moving towards a gold standard? This would make sense for them on a lot of levels and would be a true game changer for a world that currently revolves around the petrodollar.
by davefairtex 
