Foriegn investors buying up silver/gold in the U.S.?

[theo]

Below is an excerpt from the comments section (page 2) of an article. The idea that foriegners are buying and removing PMs from this country is very troubling to me (not that I blame them). This is the first time I've heard this although it sounds fairly credible to me. I'm curious as to how prevailent this is. Has anyone else heard about or seen this happening?

If this is actually happening on a large enough scale, it means that buying physical PMs should be done not only to protect ones wealth, but also to ensure that a certain amount of physical bullion remains on the right side of the Atlantic/Pacific.

"The few active buyers are well-informed, deep-pocketed and predominantly foreign. This to me was the biggest and most concerning (for the US) point of Robert's interview. After many decades of amassing bullion from around the world, the US populace is now blindly dis-hording that wealth. It's now going to very savvy buyers who are buying based on a fundamental appreciation of the true future value of gold & silver. They buy in big quantities on a regular basis, and make even bigger ones during price downdrafts. And much of what they buy goes outside the US (Robert sees the biggest demand from Asia these days).

As an adjunct to this last point, I dropped by Robert's shop at the end of the day yesterday to let him know we published the interview. We chatted about these points above, and he observed that I was the only non-foreign customer who had come into his shop that day. Almost as if on cue, a regular customer of his from India walked in the door and quickly purchased nearly $35k in bullion. "

http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/robe ... 1#comments

[cesariojpn]

There was a show on NatGeo that occasionally runs in rotation where they show planes in the UAE unloading Unit load devices (ULD) filled with gold bullion.

[Engineer]

I forget where I saw it, but there was an article not too long ago about Asians being behind many of the cash for gold companies.

[beauanderos]

I don't know why you find this alarming. Why does it matter who owns precious metals? As long as they are in strong hands they implement a quicker eventual run-up in price. Americans dishoarding metals? Of course they are, out of ignorance, greed, or the need for instant gratification. 99% of Americans don't own precious metals, and the few that come temporarily into possession of it soon sell for nominal profits. By the time there is a significant price rise, severe sourcing problems will exist... you will not be able to buy affordable silver because it won't be found. Just as there is now a premium on silver when there is a huge price dip, so shall the same occur as prices gain exponential momentum. Those who hold them will not sell at spot, but will demand a healthy premium, as the price is moving so fast that by the time they receive payment the fiat they gain will have lost a portion of it's value. Would you sell silver at $500 an ounce, when you know it will be $550 or $600 before your payment clears? No... you would either not sell to begin with, or demand a premium so that you gain fair compensation in a fast-moving market. The day is coming folks, not too far off now.

[Beau]

.
I have been telling the people here that is happening, now I guess they will beleive it when I show them this.

you will deal, with people from India if:
1. you buy gas for your car.
2. you stay in a motel or hotel.
3. you buy any kind of booze.

this week they bought out one of the largest shopping center here.
my brother was in the store paying for Gas, he ask the guy what they planned to do with the shopping center.
he quickly said we didn`t buy it, my brother said you did it went to tne court house for filing this morning.
the guy called another guy to run the register. he then walked outside and ask who told my brother. my brother said its no secret when it get this far.
he said we have a lease we will have to honor until renewal time.
then we can go up all we want to and then they will move out and we can put in stores for our people from India.
this town belongs to them now.
they bought the last gas station and all the stores now in town.
that will put a lot of people out of their jobs.
TEXAS you are next.

the only name you will get from him is "Sunshine" as his name.
if you live in south Texas you will see 66 gas stations changing the name to
"SUNSHINE XX" with the store number behind his name where I have the XX.


the same guy came here from India about 3 years ago, and now owns this town.
he was in Beaumont Texas. last week making the deal on buying 66 gas stations.

I didn`t know they were buying PM`s, but what else can they spend their money on, after they get all their family over here.

I was planning to sell my house and build a new house about 5 miles away, but now I think I will move to another town.
well this is the crap, I don`t think you can find a town they don`t own or will soon, its the same in all the towns around here, and I guess everywhere.



.

[theo]

I don't know why you find this alarming. Why does it matter who owns precious metals? As long as they are in strong hands they implement a quicker eventual run-up in price. Americans dishoarding metals? Of course they are, out of ignorance, greed, or the need for instant gratification. 99% of Americans don't own precious metals, and the few that come temporarily into possession of it soon sell for nominal profits. By the time there is a significant price rise, severe sourcing problems will exist... you will not be able to buy affordable silver because it won't be found. Just as there is now a premium on silver when there is a huge price dip, so shall the same occur as prices gain exponential momentum. Those who hold them will not sell at spot, but will demand a healthy premium, as the price is moving so fast that by the time they receive payment the fiat they gain will have lost a portion of it's value. Would you sell silver at $500 an ounce, when you know it will be $550 or $600 before your payment clears? No... you would either not sell to begin with, or demand a premium so that you gain fair compensation in a fast-moving market. The day is coming folks, not too far off now.

My feeling is the fewer PMs in private hands in this country the more difficult the eventual recovery will be after the currency collapses. I believe an individual's liberty is directly connected with the amount of wealth they control be it physical (PMs, food etc) mental (knowledge and abilities) or moral(work ethic, faith, self-sufficient mindset etc). Our mental and moral wealth has been eroding for decades as we depend increasingly on China for consumer goods and the government for our paychecks. I supposed that I shouldn't be surprised to see physical wealth in the form of gold and silver follow suit. But make no mistake, every suitcase full of PMs leaving for China or India will decrease the pool of capital needed to rebuild our economy in the coming years.

[Engineer]

But make no mistake, every suitcase full of PMs leaving for China or India will decrease the pool of capital needed to rebuild our economy in the coming years.

+1

Ray is looking more at the short term which suits his needs and you can't blame him for that. Many of us, however, are trying to plan for the next twenty years instead of the next twenty months.

[68Camaro]

This apparent trend (US citizens selling off PM) is troubling, but it's one of many trends that have been going in the wrong direction in this country for 3-4 decades (if not longer). I don't blame those that are buying - after all, it's what I'm doing, but I'm in the vast minority here. The short-sightedness of those that are selling troubles me, but doesn't surprise me.

The corollary to this isn't being discussed. Either these "indians" (and presumably others) are actually Americans of Asian descent, in which case they are actually making a contribution to the country by buying capital (real estate, etc) and saving PM, or they are foreigners who are buying gold here, which suggests that real physical metal is actually cheaper here in the US than elsewhere. If the latter, ask yourselves why they are buying here. The answer to that is because only Americans - in all the world - undervalue PMs so much.

[OldPeddler]

If you were holding a mass of a currency that was loosing value faster than you could spend it What would you do? The same that they are doing and what I an doing. Take that worthless currency and buy as much REAL money you could. Going through a strong box that I hadnot open for years, I came across a Gold Eagle, that I had purchased in 1996 for $350.00. Well in 96 that would have bought 300 Gal of gas. How much gas will that Eagle buy today? You Guessed right 300 gal. I wished I had more US DOLLARS to turn in to gols and SILVER.

[beauanderos]

But make no mistake, every suitcase full of PMs leaving for China or India will decrease the pool of capital needed to rebuild our economy in the coming years.

+1

Ray is looking more at the short term which suits his needs and you can't blame him for that. Many of us, however, are trying to plan for the next twenty years instead of the next twenty months.

I am 61, and my "needs" horizon, at my age, are more suited towards contemplation of how the next twenty months will unfold, rather than attempting to foresee twenty years down the road. I really think that people who feel the path we are on is somehow reversible, whether it be via retained wealth of common masses, or awakening to awareness, or people regaining control of congress and standing for reason... are naive. Call me a fatalist, but things happen for a reason. After plowing thru Chris Martenson's Crash Course, and half a dozen books on peak oil, I am convicted that they are right. Our present lifestyles are unsustainable. I too have noticed that there is an influx of investment capital from foreign shores, and more and more, whether it be chains of gas stations, Subway or Quizno's chains, or whatever... ownership and management is flowing to those who have real wealth and invest it into productive means. This is a combination of the knowledge of what real money is (something most Americans are too clueless to understand) and, in the Indian's case, a history of retention of their wealth in the forms of gold and silver. That money has been amassed for centuries and is now flowing where capital development (to their benefit) will accrue. They have few opportunities within their own overcrowded country, so they relocate. At least they appear as entrepreneurs with deep pockets, rather than others who simply wish to live on welfare off our misplaced largesse. As far as myself, my goal is to amass an amount (not there yet) sufficient to sustain me in comfort so that I can retire from my day job and spend full time increasing my net worth with real money. To what end? Because each one of us has a circle of friends and relatives who haven't planned well, and no matter how much we urge, will continue to fail to do so, or cannot. Therefore it is incumbent upon those of us who KNOW what is approaching to sacrifice now with delayed gratification, thus to prepare as best as possible with physical and financial, as well as spiritual prepping, for the hard times that are sure to come... so that we can provide shelter and sustenance for each of our circles of fools who become destitute in short order. There is a new totem pole appearing on the landscape, and the visage of Americans is fast sliding down the mast. Some call it learning to accept a much lower standard of living, I assert that it reflects more upon the golden rule. "He who has the gold, makes the rules." And it won't be, for the large part, Americans. We got free lunch for decades, but it's now time to tighten our belts and get used to hunger... for the brown paper bag is down to the last few crumbs, and they too, soon shall be gone.

[beauanderos]

An example of the complacency I witness firsthand in my current field of employment as an RN is this. I work amidst technicians who cannulate patients with needles and tubing to facilitate dialysis. These techs frequently lament their financial states, working two jobs to get by, and frequently state that "I'm going back to school to get my RN degree," the belief being expressed that this will provide them with life on easy street. However... do they go back to school? This is where it gets interesting. Among my co-workers who hold this attitude... it is the newly arrived first generation foreigners (Laotians, Hmongs, Indians) who are going to school, even if it's just a class or two per semester, to further their goals. The others are all talk. They have every excuse under the sun for procrastinating. There's nobody to watch my kids (well then frikkin quit cranking out babies every year!). And how do they actually spend their time? Playing on their ipods, texting each other, spending time on the computer shopping for purses and shoes (despite my pleas for them to save money and buy silver... I finally gave up... ironically one Indian doctor took my advice and he now gravitates to me whenever he is in the clinic for current advice on investments, rather than rounding on his patients). The point I'm making is because of complacency, these Americans who plan to go back to school to better themselves have waited too long. There is a flood of RN's from overseas, predominately of filipino descent, filling the positions of the jobs my coworkers would hope to aspire to. At some of the local hospitals as much as two-thirds of the nurses are from the Philippines. You snooze, you lose. Rant over.

[theo]

Wow! Some very impressive posts in this thread!

I agree with Camaro. I'm not concerned with foreigners bringing their capital (be it money or skills) to the U.S. That has happened here for the past 150 years and it part of who we have been. However, the dealer in article pretty clearly stated that foreign nationals are buying PMs here and taking them back home. This appears to go well beyond picking a few silver eagles to show the kids. The dealer (Mish) implies that the primary reason for some of these trips is to buy PMs. One might argue that these stories are self-serving on the part of the dealer, but then the author corroberates at least one such purchase ($35k) in the comments. As I said before I can't blame them as it is really an indictment of those who are selling. Although I think a share of the blame falls on our education system which is unable or unwilling to teach basic economics, not to mention math or english!

Anyway, here is another excerpt:

"A lot of it is going overseas.
A lot of the coins that came to America over the decades, over the generations, either through the fact that we had the money to buy them or through immigration or through the spoils of war, it is all going back now to the home countries. Especially if it is a home country, where their economies are rising and the people are saving rather than spending.

Just last night we had two visitors from China, colleagues of mine in Shanghai, they flew here just to see me, and they flew back the next morning. They cannot get enough coins in China; they are buying everything back that came here when the people in China could not buy their own coins. Next weekend I have more visitors coming. Coin shows, which have been all over America, are now appearing all over the world. There are now major coin shows in gathering marts in Singapore, Tokyo, Beijing, Hong Kong. It used to be once a year; now it is three, four times a year. Big auctions that used to be held in the United States are now organizing in Hong Kong and other countries."

[beauanderos]

Western Civilisation: Decline – or Fall?
By Niall Ferguson

As a freshman historian at Oxford back in 1982, I was required to read Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Ever since that first encounter with the greatest of all historians, I have pondered the question whether or not the modern West could succumb to degenerative tendencies similar to the ones described so vividly by Gibbon. My most recent book, Civilization: The West and the Rest attempts an answer to that question.

The good news is that I do not believe that Western civilization is in some kind of gradual, inexorable decline. In my view, civilizations do not rise, fall, and then gently decline, as inevitably and predictably as the four seasons or the seven ages of man. History is not one smooth, parabolic curve after another. The bad news is that its shape is more like an exponentially steepening slope that quite suddenly drops off like a cliff.

To see what I mean, pay a visit to Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas. In 1530 the Incas were the masters of all they surveyed from the heights of the Peruvian Andes. Within less than a decade, foreign invaders with horses, gunpowder, and lethal diseases had smashed their empire to smithereens. Today tourists gawp at the ruins that remain.

The notion that civilizations do not decline but collapse inspired the anthropologist Jared Diamond's 2005 book, Collapse. But Diamond focused, fashionably, on man-made environmental disasters as the causes of collapse. As a historian, I take a broader view. My point is that when you look back on the history of past civilizations, a striking feature is the speed with which most of them collapsed, regardless of the cause.

The Roman Empire did not decline and fall over a millennium, as Gibbon's monumental work seemed to suggest. It collapsed within a few decades in the early fifth century, tipped over the edge of chaos by barbarian invaders and internal divisions. In the space of a generation, the vast imperial metropolis of Rome fell into disrepair, the aqueducts broken, the splendid marketplaces deserted. The Ming dynasty's rule in China also fell apart with extraordinary speed in the mid–17th century, succumbing to internal strife and external invasion. Again, the transition from equipoise to anarchy took little more than a decade.

A more recent and familiar example of precipitous decline is, of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union. And, if you still doubt that collapse comes suddenly, just think of how the postcolonial dictatorships of North Africa and the Middle East imploded this year. Twelve months ago, Messrs. Ben Ali, Mubarak, and Gaddafi seemed secure in their gaudy palaces. Here yesterday, gone today.

What all these collapsed powers have in common is that the complex social systems that underpinned them suddenly ceased to function. One minute rulers had legitimacy in the eyes of their people; the next they did not. This process is a familiar one to students of financial markets. Even as I write, it is far from clear that the European Monetary Union can be salvaged from the dramatic collapse of confidence in the fiscal policies of its peripheral member states. In the realm of power, as in the domain of the bond vigilantes, you are fine until you are not fine—and when you're not fine, you are suddenly in a terrifying death spiral.

The West first surged ahead of the Rest after about 1500 thanks to a series of institutional innovations that (to entice younger readers) I call the "killer applications":

1. Competition. Europe was politically fragmented into multiple monarchies and republics, which were in turn internally divided into competing corporate entities, among them the ancestors of modern business corporations.

2. The Scientific Revolution. All the major 17th-century breakthroughs in mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology happened in Western Europe.

3. The Rule of Law and Representative Government. An optimal system of social and political order emerged in the English-speaking world, based on private-property rights and the representation of property owners in elected legislatures.

4. Modern Medicine. Nearly all the major 19th- and 20th-century breakthroughs in health care were made by Western Europeans and North Americans.

5. The Consumer Society. The Industrial Revolution took place where there was both a supply of productivity-enhancing technologies and a demand for more, better, and cheaper goods, beginning with cotton garments.

6. The Work Ethic. Westerners were the first people in the world to combine more extensive and intensive labor with higher savings rates, permitting sustained capital accumulation.

For hundreds of years, these killer apps were essentially monopolized by Europeans and their cousins who settled in North America and Australasia. They are the best explanation for what economic historians call "the great divergence": the astonishing gap that arose between Western standards of living and those in the rest of the world. In 1500 the average Chinese was richer than the average North American. By the late 1970s the American was more than 20 times richer than the Chinese.

Westerners not only grew richer than "Resterners." They grew taller, healthier, and longer-lived. They also grew more powerful. By the early 20th century, just a dozen Western empires—including the United States—controlled 58 percent of the world's land surface and population, and a staggering 74 percent of the global economy.

Beginning with Japan, however, one non-Western society after another has worked out that these apps can be downloaded and installed in non-Western operating systems. That explains about half the catching up that we have witnessed in our lifetimes, especially since the onset of economic reforms in China in 1978.

I am not one of those people filled with angst at the thought of a world in which the average American is no longer vastly richer than the average Chinese. I welcome the escape of hundreds of millions of Asians from poverty, not to mention the improvements we are seeing in South America and parts of Africa. But there is a second, more insidious cause of the "great reconvergence," which I do deplore—and that is the tendency of Western societies to delete their own killer apps.

Who's got the work ethic now? The average South Korean works about 39 percent more hours per week than the average American. The school year in South Korea is 220 days long, compared with 180 days in the U.S. And you do not have to spend too long at any major U.S. university to know which students really drive themselves: the Asians and Asian-Americans. The consumer society? 26 of the 30 biggest shopping malls in the world are now in emerging markets, mostly in Asia. Modern medicine? As a share of gross domestic product, the United States spends twice what Japan spends on health care and more than three times what China spends. Yet life expectancy in the U.S. has risen from 70 to 78 in the past 50 years, compared with leaps from 68 to 83 in Japan and from 43 to 73 in China.

The rule of law? For a real eye-opener, take a look at the latest World Economic Forum (WEF) Executive Opinion Survey. On no fewer than 15 of 16 different issues relating to property rights and governance, the United States fares worse than Hong Kong. Indeed, the U.S. makes the global top 20 in only one area: investor protection. On every other count, its reputation is shockingly bad. The U.S. ranks 86th in the world for the costs imposed on business by organized crime, 50th for public trust in the ethics of politicians, 42nd for various forms of bribery, and 40th for standards of auditing and financial reporting.

What about science? U.S.-based scientists continue to walk off with plenty of Nobel Prizes each year. But Nobel winners are old men. The future belongs not to them but to today's teenagers. Here is another striking statistic. Every three years the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development's Program for International Student Assessment tests the educational attainment of 15-year-olds around the world. The latest data on "mathematical literacy" reveal that the gap between the world leaders—the students of Shanghai and Singapore—and their American counterparts is now as big as the gap between U.S. kids and teenagers in Albania and Tunisia.

The late, lamented Steve Jobs convinced Americans that the future would be "Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China." Yet statistics from the World Intellectual Property Organization show that already more patents originate in Japan than in the U.S., that South Korea overtook Germany to take third place in 2005, and that China has just overtaken Germany too.

Finally, there's competition, the original killer app that sent the fragmented West down a completely different path from monolithic imperial China. The WEF has conducted a comprehensive Global Competitiveness survey every year since 1979. Since the current methodology was adopted in 2004, the United States' average competitiveness score has fallen from 5.82 to 5.43, one of the steepest declines among developed economies. China's score, meanwhile, has leapt up from 4.29 to 4.90.

Not only is the U.S. less competitive abroad. Perhaps more disturbing is the decline of meaningful competition at home, as the social mobility of the postwar era has given way to an extraordinary social polarization. You do not have to be an Occupy Wall Street activist to believe that the American super-rich elite—the 1 percent that collects 20 percent of the income—has become dangerously divorced from the rest of society, especially from the underclass at the bottom of the income distribution.

But if we are headed toward collapse, what will it look like? An upsurge in civil unrest and crime, as happened in the 1970s? A loss of faith on the part of investors and a sudden Greek-style leap in government borrowing costs? How about a spike of violence in the Middle East, from Iraq to Afghanistan, as insurgents capitalize on our troop withdrawals? Or a paralyzing cyberattack from the rising Asian superpower we complacently underrate?

Is there anything we can do to prevent such disasters? Social scientist Charles Murray calls for a "civic great awakening"—a return to the original values of the American republic. He has a point. Far more than in Europe, most Americans remain instinctively loyal to the killer applications of Western ascendancy, from competition all the way through to the work ethic. They know the country has the right software. They just cannot understand why it is running so damn slowly.

What we need to do is to delete the viruses that have crept into our system: the anticompetitive quasi monopolies that blight everything from banking to public education; the politically correct pseudosciences and soft subjects that deflect good students away from hard science; the lobbyists who subvert the rule of law for the sake of the special interests they represent—to say nothing of our crazily dysfunctional system of health care, our overleveraged personal finances, and our newfound unemployment ethic.

Then we need to download the updates that are running more successfully in other countries, from Finland to New Zealand, from Denmark to Hong Kong, from Singapore to Sweden. And finally we need to reboot our whole system.

Voters and politicians alike dare not postpone the big reboot. If what we are risking is not decline but downright collapse, then the time frame may even be tighter than one election cycle.

[68Camaro]

Roger that...

[scrapper2010]

At first glance I thought, damn, Ray was a history major at Oxford? Then I realized I missed the first sentence.

[Nickelmeister]

Below is an excerpt from the comments section (page 2) of an article. The idea that foriegners are buying and removing PMs from this country is very troubling to me (not that I blame them). This is the first time I've heard this although it sounds fairly credible to me. I'm curious as to how prevailent this is. Has anyone else heard about or seen this happening?

If this is actually happening on a large enough scale, it means that buying physical PMs should be done not only to protect ones wealth, but also to ensure that a certain amount of physical bullion remains on the right side of the Atlantic/Pacific.

"The few active buyers are well-informed, deep-pocketed and predominantly foreign. This to me was the biggest and most concerning (for the US) point of Robert's interview. After many decades of amassing bullion from around the world, the US populace is now blindly dis-hording that wealth. It's now going to very savvy buyers who are buying based on a fundamental appreciation of the true future value of gold & silver. They buy in big quantities on a regular basis, and make even bigger ones during price downdrafts. And much of what they buy goes outside the US (Robert sees the biggest demand from Asia these days).

As an adjunct to this last point, I dropped by Robert's shop at the end of the day yesterday to let him know we published the interview. We chatted about these points above, and he observed that I was the only non-foreign customer who had come into his shop that day. Almost as if on cue, a regular customer of his from India walked in the door and quickly purchased nearly $35k in bullion. "

http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/robe ... 1#comments

Not to be a $hit disturber, but who says we (North Americans) are from the "right side" of the ocean?
As a cash-for-gold operator, I see the daily transfer of PMs from weak (sellers) to strong (buyers) hands.
Nationality of the purchasers is pretty much irrelevent, except from the perspective of American egocentrism.

[beauanderos]

At first glance I thought, damn, Ray was a history major at Oxford? Then I realized I missed the first sentence.

I have been to Oxford, but didn't attend school there. Did you know that's where they filmed Chariots of Fire?

[theo]

Below is an excerpt from the comments section (page 2) of an article. The idea that foriegners are buying and removing PMs from this country is very troubling to me (not that I blame them). This is the first time I've heard this although it sounds fairly credible to me. I'm curious as to how prevailent this is. Has anyone else heard about or seen this happening?

If this is actually happening on a large enough scale, it means that buying physical PMs should be done not only to protect ones wealth, but also to ensure that a certain amount of physical bullion remains on the right side of the Atlantic/Pacific.

"The few active buyers are well-informed, deep-pocketed and predominantly foreign. This to me was the biggest and most concerning (for the US) point of Robert's interview. After many decades of amassing bullion from around the world, the US populace is now blindly dis-hording that wealth. It's now going to very savvy buyers who are buying based on a fundamental appreciation of the true future value of gold & silver. They buy in big quantities on a regular basis, and make even bigger ones during price downdrafts. And much of what they buy goes outside the US (Robert sees the biggest demand from Asia these days).

As an adjunct to this last point, I dropped by Robert's shop at the end of the day yesterday to let him know we published the interview. We chatted about these points above, and he observed that I was the only non-foreign customer who had come into his shop that day. Almost as if on cue, a regular customer of his from India walked in the door and quickly purchased nearly $35k in bullion. "

http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/robe ... 1#comments

Not to be a $hit disturber, but who says we (North Americans) are from the "right side" of the ocean?
As a cash-for-gold operator, I see the daily transfer of PMs from weak (sellers) to strong (buyers) hands.
Nationality of the purchasers is pretty much irrelevent, except from the perspective of American egocentrism.

You should understand I wasn't making a value judgement; I was speaking from the prospective of my nationality, which is American. If you re-read my comments you'll note that I don't blame the Chinese and Indian nationals for taking advantage of what they view as bargain prices. I would do the same thing in their position. If there is any blame to be assigned, it is on our political and economic leaders for promoting policies that caused this to happen.

To say that it is irrelevant as to which nation holds more gold/silver seems misguided to me. As I said before PMs represent future investment capital. Any nation which loses too great a percentage of their capital will find itself at a significant disadvantage. As an American I hope that doesn't happen to my country, although I fear that it is. If that makes me a bad global citizen, so be it.

[Nickelmeister]

Below is an excerpt from the comments section (page 2) of an article. The idea that foriegners are buying and removing PMs from this country is very troubling to me (not that I blame them). This is the first time I've heard this although it sounds fairly credible to me. I'm curious as to how prevailent this is. Has anyone else heard about or seen this happening?

If this is actually happening on a large enough scale, it means that buying physical PMs should be done not only to protect ones wealth, but also to ensure that a certain amount of physical bullion remains on the right side of the Atlantic/Pacific.

"The few active buyers are well-informed, deep-pocketed and predominantly foreign. This to me was the biggest and most concerning (for the US) point of Robert's interview. After many decades of amassing bullion from around the world, the US populace is now blindly dis-hording that wealth. It's now going to very savvy buyers who are buying based on a fundamental appreciation of the true future value of gold & silver. They buy in big quantities on a regular basis, and make even bigger ones during price downdrafts. And much of what they buy goes outside the US (Robert sees the biggest demand from Asia these days).

As an adjunct to this last point, I dropped by Robert's shop at the end of the day yesterday to let him know we published the interview. We chatted about these points above, and he observed that I was the only non-foreign customer who had come into his shop that day. Almost as if on cue, a regular customer of his from India walked in the door and quickly purchased nearly $35k in bullion. "

http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/robe ... 1#comments

Not to be a $hit disturber, but who says we (North Americans) are from the "right side" of the ocean?
As a cash-for-gold operator, I see the daily transfer of PMs from weak (sellers) to strong (buyers) hands.
Nationality of the purchasers is pretty much irrelevent, except from the perspective of American egocentrism.

You should understand I wasn't making a value judgement; I was speaking from the prospective of my nationality, which is American. If you re-read my comments you'll note that I don't blame the Chinese and Indian nationals for taking advantage of what they view as bargain prices. I would do the same thing in their position. If there is any blame to be assigned, it is on our political and economic leaders for promoting policies that caused this to happen.

To say that it is irrelevant as to which nation holds more gold/silver seems misguided to me. As I said before PMs represent future investment capital. Any nation which loses too great a percentage of their capital will find itself at a significant disadvantage. As an American I hope that doesn't happen to my country, although I fear that it is. If that makes me a bad global citizen, so be it.

Don't take my comment as insulting as it wasn't meant to be. As an individual PM holder, I like to see gold moving into strong hands. Would I prefer that my fellow Canadian countrymen were the ones buying? Sure, I suppose but it ain't gonna happen on a large scale. You simply cannot change the strong cultural affinity (or distaste, among the majority of North Americans) for gold that people of Asian descent have learned over thousands of years. As you have alluded to, it looks the Western world is going to end up with the short end of the stick on this one.

[theo]

I suppose I took your earlier comment the wrong way. Your point about the difference in how eastern and western cultures regarding PMs sounds sadly accurate.