by Adrian Ash
BullionVault
Tuesday, 20 December 2011

Cheer up! This permanent state of emergency is doing a wonderful nothing to unwind the bubble…

SO 2012 will mark the fifth anniversary of the global financial crisis. There’s little reason to think it’s reached its end yet. Merry Christmas.

Banking and household leverage in the rich West has barely ticked lower from the credit bubble’s historic peak of 2007. Financial leverage has only been reduced by a fraction, while governments have been stuffed like a French goose with that new debt spurned by the private sector since 2008.

So why this slow, seemingly permanent pain? Because interest rates are still set at zero, with no uptick in sight – an emergency measure that’s now etched in stone. “There is a lot of financial stress out there,” the UK insolvency specialist Begbies Traynor moaned last week. “[But] if it wasn’t for low interest rates the number of insolvencies would have been twice what they are.” Twice as many debtors would have enjoyed a write-down, in short. But do you really think their creditors sleep any better knowing what’s keeping debtors in debt?

The gambit of low rates – first played in mid-2007 and now stuck – comes from studying the Great Depression of 80 years ago. If only the US Federal Reserve had slashed rates to zero, then today’s central bankers could have avoided the deflation of their grandparents. Low teaser rates under Alan Greenspan have thus become permanently low revolving rates under Ben Bernanke. Which is where the mechanics of this depression stands apart from the downturn of, say, 30 years ago.

Back then, central bankers imposed deflation by hiking short-term interest rates towards 20% per year. Today the credit crunch is priced into the weakest balance-sheets only, and in the interbank lending market, where liquidity has vanished again in 2011. Contrast with the early 1980s’ depression, when bond yields badly lagged policy in forcing through the deflation. Ten-year US Treasury yields, for instance, broke into double digits 10 months after the Federal Reserve’s overnight target rate breached that level. It wasn’t until 1983 that the curve reverted to normal, with 10-year bonds offering a higher rate of return than overnight credit held at the Fed.

The impact of this policy-driven deflation? A rise in the Dollar so strong – both in real purchasing and forex conversion terms – that it unwound all of gold’s plunge for non-Dollar investors.

That we’re living through deflation again today is plain, no matter how far the Fed and other central banks string it out. A deflation in credit, asset prices and economic activity. A deflation that doesn’t need shop prices to fall; it’s still “a deterioration of the monetary standard”, this one characterized by volatility as much as deleveraging, but also squeezing debtors every time the Dollar rises.

That in turn is squeezing creditors, of course, now terrified of default and writedowns but so far spared the actual pain. The worst of all possible worlds results. No new investment, because lenders won’t lend and debtors won’t borrow. No write-down or write-off of existing debt, lugging a permanent drag onto economic activity. And meantime the Dollar remains money the world over, proving last decade’s Cassandras early, wrong or just stupid.

Call me all three if you like; the last thing the world wanted pre-2007 or today is a rising Dollar. Not the US, China, Europe or anyone else. So just to screw the most people the most, that’s what we keep getting. But only in fits and starts. Which like the wonderful nothing achieved by zero interest rates, might just be the very worst we could ask.

Plenty of chart analysts and media hacks will tell you today that the price of gold just broke below its 200-day moving average. The smarter ones will add that it fell through the uptrend starting with the great deflation of Lehman’s collapse, too. But only in US Dollar terms, we note here at BullionVault.

Look at gold ex-the Dollar – as our bright orange line does above. The Dollar devaluation, forced through by Ben Bernanke cutting in line and slashing rates faster than anyone else in 2007-2008, worked such magic that non-Dollar investors are now – to date – wearing a much shallower top-and-drop pattern in gold so far.

This might matter. Because gold has outperformed all other assets (and very nearly all mutual and hedge funds too) since the eve of this crisis. Most people thank the inflationary response of central banks everywhere. A handful think gold’s rise might instead be due to bullion offering the perfect deflation escape – a route to extricating yourself from the debtor/creditor relationship underpinning the vast bulk of alternative homes for your savings.

Either way, a Dollar rally is rarely good for the gold price. And no one, least of all the Bernanke Fed, wants to allow a persistent Dollar rally on their watch either.

Adrian Ash
BullionVault

Formerly City correspondent for The Daily Reckoning in London and head of editorial at the UK’s leading financial advisory for private investors, Adrian Ash is head of research at BullionVault – winner of the Queen’s Award for Enterprise Innovation, 2009 and now backed by the World Gold Council market-development and research body – where you can buy gold today vaulted in Zurich on $3 spreads and 0.8% dealing fees.

(c) BullionVault 2011

Please Note: This article is to inform your thinking, not lead it. Only you can decide the best place for your money, and any decision you make will put your money at risk. Information or data included here may have already been overtaken by events – and must be verified elsewhere – should you choose to act on it.

By Steve Roach – http://www.steveroachonline.com

Rare coin investment funds have been around for decades, and on Oct. 31, the formation of four new funds to be managed by Certified Assets Management International LLC, was announced. One of the funds is expected to acquire up to $250 million in rare coins.

For many, what first comes to mind regarding “coin funds” are two rare coin funds in which the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation invested a total of $50 million between 1998 and 2005.

Although the funds returned more than $10 million in profit to the state, their success was tainted when Ohio coin dealer Thomas W. Noe was found guilty of various charges including theft and money laundering related to his management of the two funds.

The concept of collectible objects forming the basis of an investment fund is not new. In the past decade several fine art funds have emerged. Philip Hoffman, CEO of The Fine Art Fund Group LTD, summarized the appeal of art-based funds, stating, “The value of a [painting by] Canaletto will never go down to zero, it will never do an Enron or a Marconi.”

The Fine Art Fund Group fund has created relationships with several major banks including the Emirates National Bank of Dubai. Gary Dugan, chief investment officer of the bank, has stated: “We’re not doing interior decoration. It’s not an aesthetic investment but a financial investment.”

Investors are increasingly turning to alternative asset classes like fine art and rare coins as stores of wealth, although the case for paintings as an investment differs somewhat from coins, in that thousands of art museums around the world acquire and serve as permanent depositories of art, creating an ever-shrinking supply of Old Master through Modern paintings.

Rare coins generally enjoy greater liquidity than fine paintings and the possible infusion of $250 million in the rare coin market could help the market reach new levels.

As some paintings can trade for up to $150 million privately, many have wondered whether the presence of institutional investors is needed for individual rare coins to break the $10 million barrier.

Whether CAMI will be able to attract investors to the funds is yet to be determined, as is the impact that an additional major buyer will have on the coin market. If the funds are done right, it could add legitimacy to rare coins as an alternative asset class worthy of high-end investor dollars.

By Mark Ferguson for CoinWeek – MFrarecoins.com

There are several of us coin dealers nationwide who’ve been in this business virtually all our lives – for 40, 50 or 60 years, or even longer – since we were teenagers, or even younger. We’ve been around the market for gold bullion all that time and have been buying and selling gold as physical assets.

We’ve all handled rare coins, collected for their numismatic attributes, such as high grade or rare date gold coins, and we’ve bought and sold gold bullion coins, valued just for their precious metals content, such as South African Krugerrands, Canadian Maple Leaf coins, and American Eagle gold coins, all one ounce of gold each.

There are also smaller sizes. As coin dealers, we’ve lived with the great swings in the gold price from $35 per ounce before the gold window reopened for Americans to own gold during the early 1970s to the record high price gold bullion reached during January, 1980 of $850, and to today’s record price of around $1,900 per ounce.

We’ve also lived with a depressed market for gold bullion that last pretty much during the rest of the 1980s and 1990s while the economy was being pumped up by the country’s rising debt load. Then the gold price began to perk up again during the early 2000s. For many of us in the coin business, what’s going on in the foundations of the financial world these days is intuitive. The recent record high prices for gold have not been a mystery to us, or even a surprise. We see the foundations of the world economies weakening because of the massive debt load, from individuals, to cities, counties, state governments, and federal or sovereign debt.

Social tension around the world is growing, and so is crime. Since World War II several generations have lived very good lives, as least economically speaking. But in doing so, our economies have been pumped up through taking on all this debt. And now it’s become unsustainable. The solution is to cut way back on government spending and produce tax revenue and employment through private sector productivity. Now the day of reckoning to pay for our good times since the war is upon us. Politicians and governments are trying their best to put this off, by putting “band aids” on the problem, like all those stimulus dollars that have been pumped into economies around the world during the past three years.

Even though gold doesn’t produce an end product, like a business does, for example, gold has been recognized as the ultimate form of money for literally thousands of years. We have to have something that represents stored value to trade for goods. When the United States Mint was created during the early 1790s U.S. coins had to contain a specific amount of gold, silver, or copper. There was no official paper U.S. currency at that time, however most people remember “Colonial Currency,” used in the colonies before we became a country, which is what preceded the official coinage of the United States of America. The U.S. didn’t have paper currency, as we know it today, until the Civil War days. Precious metals were our currency.

When paper currency was introduced into the U.S. economy, during that time, it represented a specific amount of gold or silver that was stored in vaults. For example, many people remember the “silver certificates” the U.S. used for generations. Because the price of silver was rising and the value of our paper currency was falling, the U.S. government stopped redeeming those silver certificates back in 1968. But because our society was so used to using paper money, most people didn’t notice what was happening. As this evolution moved further away from using precious metals as money, i.e. gold, silver, and copper coinage, as mandated by the young U.S. government in the 1790s, money became nothing more than paper certificates, then became computer digits, in the bigger picture. Today our money is “faith-based!” Nothing stands behind it, except the faith in our government leaders – people, just like you and me. It’s all just notations inside computers, except for the actual paper certificates in people’s wallets and cash registers.

So today our government leaders, in a good-hearted attempt to preserve our standard of living, are doing what they can to avoid an all out collapse of our financial system, exemplified by the events of late 2008, when we began to see runs on banks and financial bailouts. These bailouts, and using government and Federal Reserve created stimulus money, are just temporary fixes, while avoiding the austerity measures needed. People simply don’t want to reduce their living standards. But this may be forced upon us through natural market forces that readjust all the pumping up through the debt load that’s been taken on virtually throughout the worldwide economy, including households.

But those people who’ve been around gold for a long time, like coin dealers, know our economy is heading back to using inflation, by creating money, to stave off a depression that we all want to avoid, because we know what times were like during the 1930s. Inflation is not just printing more dollar bills, or $100 dollar bills, or even larger denominations, like $500s and $1,000 dollar bills that we used to use. There even used to be $10,000 and $100,000 bills that were mostly used within the banking system! And this could happen again. To illustrate, some people have even seen the 100 trillion dollar notes issued by the country of Zimbabwe during the past few years because of inflation.

But inflation is created more behind the scenes, where the general public doesn’t realize what’s happening. It’s a complex system of using the Fed (the Federal Reserve System) to create financial instruments, like bonds, that are traded on a high level – between governments, as well as in the private sector. Inflation will make times seem better on the one hand, because the economy will seem like it’s churning along, but prices will rise dramatically and purchasing power will diminish, like during the late 1970s. Imagine paying $10 or $15, or more, for a gallon of gas! When I was a youngster, the lowest I remember gas costing a mere 23 cents per gallon. And people older than me remember it being even cheaper.

So, yes gold doesn’t produce anything useful, like a factory does, but it’s a “store of value” asset that protects us from the destruction of our currency during inflationary times. Traditional investment gurus are claiming that gold is in a bubble because it’s at record price levels. We’ll always hear this as the price of gold continues to rise during the coming years. Will gold reach bubble proportions? – Probably, but only when the economy begins to be productive again, with nearly full employment and a debt load that’s finally under control. Do you see this happening anytime soon? – Not likely! That scenario is many years away.

As pension funds and other investment funds around the world come to the realization that gold should be a part of their portfolios, its price will skyrocket even further. It is currently estimated that less than one percent of the trillions of dollars in these funds are invested in gold. In global financial terms, the gold market is small compared to all other investments. Therefore, an investment of just one, two, or three percent, for example, by these funds will push the gold price to extraordinary heights. Just remember where the price of gasoline was during years past, and you can see a similar analogy – only it’s happening faster this time around.

When buying gold, many people want to look through a “microscope,” so to speak, and try to buy at a low point in the near term. Unless you’re an expert commodities trader, you won’t be successful. I saw many of my own customers miss some very nice profits in gold because they didn’t buy when it was below $1,000 per ounce two years ago, or more recently at just over $1,400 per ounce, as it was last summer. But does this really matter when gold reaches $10,000 per ounce, as some experts are predicting, because of the inflationary period we’re now entering and because of large investment funds jumping in?

The best strategy is to follow the long-term trend. Don’t buck the trend! And be observant of economic trends. We’re now reading and hearing about how the U.S. government recently raised retirement contributions from $16,500 per year to $17,000 per year because of inflation and also raised Social Security checks by 3 ½ percent for the same reason. We’re just at the start of a new inflationary period. Our national debt is now $15 trillion. Three years ago it was $10 trillion, and 10 years ago it was $3 trillion. It’s getting unsustainable, and I’ve read that when it gets to between $20 and $25 trillion that’s when things will really start to get tricky for our government and the Fed to get a grip on the economy. Interest rates will rise very high, like they did during the early 1980s where they reached the 20 percent level.

So, get in while we’re at the beginning of this trend, both to preserve the purchasing power of your assets and to profit. For the above reasons, many investors want to invest in the real thing – physical gold – which is outside the financial system, rather than gold stocks, or “paper gold” through large investment pools. Physical gold is best purchased in one ounce sizes which come in coin form issued by government mints, such as the American Eagle Gold coins produced by the United States Mint, or the one ounce gold Canadian Maple Leaf coins. There are many others, struck at sovereign mints around the world, and experienced coin dealers are some of the best sources to buy them from. Give any of us a call, most of us are happy to answer your questions and help guide you through the process of owning gold – how to buy it, where to store it, how to resell it, etc.

Mark Ferguson was a coin grader for PCGS , a market analyst for Coin Values and has been a coin dealer for more than 40 years. He has written for the ANA, Coin Dealer Newsletter, Coin World, Numismatic News, , Coin Values, The Numismatist and currently has a weekly column on CoinWeek. Mark can be reached at Mark Ferguson Rare Coins ( www.mfrarecoins.com)

by Louis Golino for Coin Week

These are definitely interesting times for a precious metal analyst, or anyone trying to make sense of where precious metal prices are headed.

Gold and other precious metals are traditionally viewed as safe haven investments, and as assets that help to diversify a financial portfolio because they are inversely correlated with stocks. They normally move up when stocks are down, and vice-versa.

But the global financial situation is changing all that. During the past three years, for example, gold has often moved up on the same days that stocks closed higher.

In part, that has been a function of dollar strength or weakness. When the dollar is stronger against the euro, yen, and other currencies, investors choose the safety of the dollar in the form of U.S. Treasury bonds. This is what is known as “risk off” periods.

But when the dollar is down, investors have tended to buy more stocks and gold, seeking higher yields than what they can get on Treasury bonds, which is essentially nothing. This is what the experts call “risk on.”

These days all eyes are on Europe and its debt and banking crises that threaten the future of the euro, Europe’s economies, and the global economic and financial system.

Last year whenever Greeks were protesting against austerity measures, gold tended to increase in value, as investors sought the perceived safety of precious metals.

Better-off Greeks lined up to purchase gold coins at highly inflated premiums because they worried that their paper euros would become virtually worthless.

But things have changed, and now gold often declines on the very days when it used to go up. This is an example of what I think of as “the new normal” in precious metals.

Since gold’s major correction last month, it has tended to go down on days when stocks are also down. This is often correctly attributed to a liquidity crunch, as investors seek to cover their equity losses with gold profits.

It also has something to do with increased margin requirements. In fact, this week the Commodities Futures Trading Commission decided to move forward with rules which seek to limit commodity speculation by making it harder to hedge in the form of derivatives.

It is confusing to see gold decline on days when the European crisis seems further away from resolution. But in the “new normal” world this is perhaps best understood with the “risk on/risk off” paradigm.

Precious metals actually increase in value on days when the European seem to be getting their acts together perhaps because increased global financial stability provides the space for riskier assets to flourish, and because the euro strengthens on those days.

Whenever it looks like the sky is falling, investors seek dollar safety, but when the world seems like a relatively safer place, precious metals are seen as a better choice.

This may be partly because increased financial stability helps spur global growth, which will result in higher inflation, and precious metals are still seen as a hedge against inflation.

On October 18 news reports suggested that Europe’s leaders were moving towards an almost $3 trillion rescue fund for countries like Greece and Italy, which have unsustainable levels of debt. This helped gold reverse earlier losses.

The conventional wisdom among Europe watchers is that the crisis will end with a disorderly Greek default, Greece leaving the euro, and ultimately the demise of the euro and perhaps even of the European Union itself.

As someone who has studied Europe closely for decades, I would suggest not underestimating the determination of Europe’s leaders to solve this crisis.

Greece will almost surely eventually default in one form or another, but that is something that can be managed, if handled carefully. An Italian default is another story.

Patrick Heller, who writes for Numismatic News, predicted recently that the euro could fail in the next couple weeks. There have also been rumors that the European banking system faces imminent collapse.

I am highly doubtful that either of those events will take place any time soon, and perhaps at all.

To be sure, the Europeans have been slow to fully understand the dimensions of their crisis, and their policy responses over the past two years have tended to be insufficient to say the least. Germany, in particular, has been seen as dragging its feet.

But again, I would not count the Europeans out. The cost of failure is simply too high, and the major countries of the EU are still very wealthy and wish to remain so.

They will eventually do whatever it takes to defend the euro and their own economic future. The wildcard is whether they will do it in time, that is, before serious damage is done to the euro, the EU, and the world financial system.

The EU plans to hold a key summit this coming Sunday, October 23, when leaders may approve the massive EU rescue fund. If things go as planned, which is definitely not assured, I think that the euro will strengthen and precious metals and stocks could both experience major rallies next week. They also could all decline substantially if an agreement is not reached.

German officials are downplaying the chances of a grand bargain that resolves the crisis.

There are plenty of other clouds on the precious metals and EU horizons. For example, France may be about to lose its AAA credit rating because of its high debt and deficit ratios and the pressure that bailing out other European countries would place on its banking system.

In addition, many metal watchers seem to be virtually certain that U.S. economic weakness will result in another round of asset purchases by the Federal Reserve, “QE 3,” as it is termed.

But this week Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said that its may be necessary to use monetary policy to deflate asset bubbles, so those counting on QE 3 may be disappointed.

It is not easy to reach agreement among 17 sovereign EU countries, and each of them has a domestic populace that helps shape policy.

In Germany, for example, public opinion is strongly against bailing out what it sees as its profligate southern neighbors.

But Germany will do whatever it takes because it simply has no choice. If it abandoned the euro, its economy would go into a tailspin because a new Deutschmark would be vastly stronger than the euro and that would be very harmful for German exports, which are the motor of the German economy.

Similarly, Greece can’t afford to leave the euro because it would result in high inflation and a collapse of the banking system and economy.

So don’t count the euro out just yet, and expect gold and other precious metals to continue to act in counter-intuitive ways.

Louis Golino is a coin collector and numismatic writer, whose articles on coins have appeared in Coin World, Numismatic News, and a number of different coin web sites. His column for Coin Week, “The Coin Analyst,” covers U.S. and world coins and precious metals. He collects U.S. and European coins and is a member of the ANA, PCGS, NGC, and CAC. He has also worked for the U.S. Library of Congress and has been a syndicated columnist and news analyst on international affairs for a wide variety of newspapers and web sites.

By Louis Golino for Coin Week

August 15 marked the 40th anniversary of the end of the gold standard. In 1971 President Richard M. Nixon ended the convertibility of the dollar with gold, which paved the way for the system of floating, fiat currencies that exists today.

Ever since then the U.S. dollar has continued to lose purchasing power. More and more printing of dollars has fueled inflation and produced a long-term secular decline in the dollar’s value, although it is still the world’s reserve currency.

Many analysts and economists, especially those of a conservative persuasion, have been calling for an end to the fiat dollar in recent years. They have proposed that the paper dollar be replaced with one backed by American gold reserves.

In recent years some people have questioned whether the gold that is supposed to be held at Fort Knox is actually there, and whether gold owned by other countries is also stored there.

I have read that some foreign gold, including from Germany, has been stored in Federal Reserve banks, but it is not clear whether there is any foreign gold at Fort Knox.

In my view U.S. gold reserves are more than likely safely stored where they should be, but conspiracy theories are fueled by the fact that independent observers are hardly ever given access to Fort Knox. Many years ago CBS’ “60 Minutes” did a segment in which the reporter was allowed to view the gold in Fort Knox.

Periodic proposals for a new gold standard have ultimately gone nowhere.

But the substantial increase in the money supply since the 2008 financial crisis coupled with the continuing decline in the dollar, the increase in the Federal debt, and the significant rise in gold prices, have helped fuel renewed calls for a new gold standard.

It has been estimated that a new gold standard would require that each ounce of gold be valued at $10,000.

This figure, which was reported by Bloomberg on September 15, is the “fair value” for gold if each dollar were backed by an ounce of gold from American gold reserves. According to the most recent data, America’s gold reserves are only enough to cover 18% of the current monetary base at today’s gold prices.

There have been a number of interesting developments recently that involve the use of physical gold as a form of currency.

First, several states have either passed or at least introduced laws to make gold legal tender.

Utah has passed such a bill, while Idaho, Minnesota, North Carolina, and South Carolina have introduced such bills. Georgia introduced but dot not pass a bill requiring that payments to the state be made only with U.S.-minted precious metal coins.

Second, there have been proposals to end the federal capital gains tax on precious metals profits. Currently they are taxed at the rate of 28%, the same rate that collectible coins are taxed at, as opposed to the 15% rate paid on stock profits.

Rep. Ron Paul, who is the Chairman of the Domestic Monetary Policy Subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee and a Republican candidate for president, recently held a legislative hearing regarding H.R. 1098, the “Free Competition in Currency Act.”

He is a long-time proponent of once again backing our currency with gold and silver to make our currency sound money.

Rep. Paul noted that “This bill eliminates three of the major obstacles to the circulation of sound money: federal legal tender laws that force acceptance of Federal Reserve Notes; “counterfeiting” laws that serve no purpose other than to ban the creation of private commodity currencies; and tax laws that penalize the use of gold and silver coins as money.”

During the hearing, Dr. Lawrence Parks of the Foundation for Monetary Education said that until the 1971 end of the gold standard, the U.S. price level (in other words, inflation) was stable. He also explained that in his view a gold-backed dollar would make collapse of the U.S. and global financial systems impossible.

Third, one of the largest precious metals dealers in the world, the American Precious Metals Exchange (APMEX), recently made a down payment on a 10-year lease of a New York building owned by real estate mogul and former Presidential candidate Donald Trump with gold bullion instead of cash. The gold was three .9999 fine bars totaling 96.45 ounces.

The building where APMEX is leasing an entire floor to expand its operations is located at 40 Wall Street, which is known as the “crown jewel” of lower Manhattan.

There are certain obstacles to the implementation of a new U.S. gold standard.

One major challenge is that according to most experts there is not enough physical gold to create a workable monetary system based on gold.

Lord Robert Skidelsky, a famous British economic historian, has argued that moving to a new gold standard would be highly deflationary to the point that it would cause a worldwide depression.

Deficit spending and money printing are certainly problematic for the long-term financial health of the U.S., but in certain circumstances, such as the current economic crisis, it may serve a useful temporary role.

Under this perspective, when the monetary base shrinks and lending dries up, the government pursues an expansionary monetary policy to increase liquidity and lowers interest rates to encourage borrowing.

Of course, the downside is that if used too much, as many people believe is the case now, such a policy also wipes out the savings and purchasing power of dollar holders.

Some analysts point out that even under a new gold standard, the size of the monetary base would still ebb and flow depending on the price per ounce at which the dollar is pegged, which could be changed over time. That would still amount to a form of devaluation or revaluation of the dollar.

I do not know whether a gold-based dollar would work in today’s world, but I am sure there will be increasing calls for it if the economic situation continues to deteriorate.

In addition, there are some interesting ideas for using our gold reserves to reduce our debts.

One that caught my attention is a proposal from Numismatic News editor David Harper, who has argued in favor reducing the Federal debt by issuing 20-year gold bonds.

Investors in these bonds would be paid a one-ounce American gold eagle each year as a dividend payment on a $360,000 gold bond. This would allow the Federal government to raise $4.68 trillion over 20 years based on gold at $1800.

Contacted for this article, Mr. Harper added that “A new gold standard in the United States would restore confidence in the dollar and the economy only if arrangements for the transition would be considered doable by the financial markets. It took the United States 35 years to move from the financial mess created by the Civil War to formally adopting the gold standard in 1900.”

Louis Golino is a coin collector and numismatic writer, whose articles on coins have appeared in Coin World, Numismatic News, and a number of different coin web sites. His column for Coin Week, “The Coin Analyst,” covers U.S. and world coins and precious metals. He collects U.S. and European coins and is a member of the ANA, PCGS, NGC, and CAC. He has also worked for the U.S. Library of Congress and has been a syndicated columnist and news analyst on international affairs for a wide variety of newspapers and web sites.