Not invented here

It is not often something on the web makes me laugh out loud (LOL) but just one word of a posting caught my attention. It deserves to be added to the Oxford English Dictionary.

"govmuppets" - describes a Government Minister blindly trying to peddle a long dead project.

Alaric

Gold and Tungsten

Unlike the gold bar in my publisher's competition there may be be a big problem with the gold stored in places such as Fort Knox and the Bank of England. Whilst researching for the third book I came across the fact that tungsten metal has almost exactly the same density as metallic gold. Couple this with gold being currently about 800 times the price of tungsten, it offers the ideal opportunity for fraud by embedding tungsten within gold bars.

A little bit further investigation on Google there are plenty of recent stories on this subject, here's one such recent story and another. Of course you should be cautious about believing all that you see on the internet, but the precursor conditions are there and there seems to be a lot of speculation.

Couple this with the fact that a lot of people have put their money into gold following the recent sub-prime mortgage scandal. For convenience most of these people either bought a share of a gold bar stored somewhere in a gold vault or they purchased shares in the companies holding gold bars. Some of these securities are called ETFs. (Exchange Traded Funds?). The rumour is that in some cases the underlying physical gold bar security may have been re-leased several times for different securities, i.e. the total risk greatly exceed the value of the underlying asset. 

Now the Perfect Storm conditions arise when people realise that the same gold bar is in fact gold plated tungsten. The fake bar weighs almost exactly the same as real gold. suddenly a whole bunch of paper securities are totally valueless.

The rumour further extends in that the governments of India, Russia, China have been buying gold bars to soak up all of the excess dollars that they've accumulated, but you've guessed it ....  So now they are carefully testing every bar and refusing any that is not as it should be. So if a western bank wants to sell gold to the expanding economy countries it will not be possible to pass the fake gold, thus the ratio of fake gold/real gold in their vaults will increase. 


A relatively simple electronic test can spot the fake gold. Of course the UK & USA Governments could easily quash this story as a rumour if they employed an independent team to check each gold bar in the reserves and other major Banks. Sadly though, who would believe Gordon Brown if he stood hand on heart and said our gold is ok?

Alaric

Adam's in Afghanistan

I've just landed Adam Cranford in Afghanistan to rescue some one important. Let's hope the Coalition Troops don't send any friendly fire in his direction.

Alaric

New edition of Company Mole

There's going to be a revised edition of Company Mole. We've just got the re-edited version back from our new copy editor Autumn Conley and she has picked up loads of errors. The new edition goes to press in the next ten days or so. Curses on Thomas the original editor.


I've been running a competition to win a solid gold bar for the Adam Cranford marketing. It was surprising how poor the response was to an advert in the regional press. We are monitoring the initial response website, so have pretty clear figures. Still it makes a change from the London Evening Standard who actually banned one of my early adverts because it contained the word "Teen". Political correctness gone mad. I did have a great laugh when the Evening Standard was sold for 50 pence to a Russian Business Man. It is maybe a sign that regional newspapers are effectively dead.

Alaric

Top Secret

Many years ago I used to work on classified projects for the UK government. Documents were kept in combination locked security safes and documents were signed in and out from a file registry. It was highly classified stuff. We soon got to learn that the most secret documents were those that were Politically Embarrassing. Those documents had to be treated with the utmost care. 

Along comes the Gulf War and a certain Dr David Kelly the Government Weapons Inspector who released secrets that were politically embarrassing to the Government. The terrible "Weapons of Mass Destruction"!  After a lot of pressure and smearing he ended up dead in an isolated woodland. The documents from his inquest have been "sealed" for 70 years. Wasn't it an ancient English King who once uttered the words: "Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?" 

Now we are seeing the charity "The National Bullying Helpline" getting the Kelly Treatment from the establishment. Their crime? To release information that is embarrassing to those at No: 10 Downing Street. The Establishment is closing ranks and persecuting the founder of the helpline while the real Bully is escaping the limelight. Essentially what we are seeing is yet more bullying from the Government. 

Alaric

The Banks just don't get it do they?

I've just seen a rant on a Blogsite where the author bewails that banks are not charities. It is typical view of a majority of investment bankers who think that they are owed a highly paid job where the remuneration is orders of magnitude greater than the average national wage. In fact most of their jobs are not that complex and there not really much more personal risk than someone working in an industrial firm. I've seen these people at work for over 30 years, so I know what they do.

The tax payers rescued the banking system. Without that rescue those highly paid bankers would be on the street. It certainly is good fodder for a storyline in my next book.

Alaric.

Back to work

I'm finally making progress with the third book of the Adam Cranford series. I've had a month or so of writers' block, coupled with a busy time in my main job of creating trading floors. One of the things that we advise on is physical security in trading floors and data centers. The managers are beginning to realise the depth of public anger over the banking crisis and the obscene levels of bonuses/salary for traders. They realise that this will soon spill over into real attacks on their business premises by the angry public. Look to see some of this in Book 3.

Alaric