Gold is dead. How many times have we heard this narrative spouted by prominent billionaires beholden to the fiat currency system that helped them get rich, and in recent years, by bitcoin maximalists? The latest to join this anti-gold narrative is bitcoin maximalist Scott Melker, but I’m willing to bet he will be exposed as being dead wrong about this narrative in just a year to a few years from now. We all know that there have always been a constant group of people that have dumped on gold every chance they have received, including billionaires Warren Buffet, Charlie Munger, Michael Saylor and Mark Cuban, self-described visionary Harry Dent, and bitcoin maximalists. Below, you will find another image of a bitcoin maximalist proclaiming “gold is dead.” I’m betting that in about another few years’ time, or possibly even before that, that proclamation is going to look as foolish as Harry Dent’s five year futile run of trying to predict a gold price crash to $700 a troy ounce. Despite missing the mark by more than 75% on multiple years with his gold price crash to $700, Harry Dent continued to make the same annual prediction that made him look completely foolish year after year after year after year after…well, I think he recently finally gave up on his gold crashing to $700 price prediction.
In any event, despite the mainstream media preoccupation with China’s goal to develop Afghanistan’s rich mineral treasures of an estimated $3 trillion of rare earth minerals, that by the way, received zero criticism of exploitation by the mass media when France, Germany and the United States were the ones trying, but failing, to develop these mineral properties to extract with no benefit to the Afghani people, let’s focus on the gold story of Afghanistan that has been far more overlooked than the rare earth minerals story. If we do, the gold is dead narrative, increasingly becoming worrisome to gold investors, will be rightfully exposed as a To begin, the Western banking cartel has a history of stealing other nations’ gold reserves under the cover of the narrative that geopolitical instability necessitates the seizure of a nation’s gold to prevent it from falling into “the wrong hands”.
This happened in Iraq, with the US military looting and seizing Saddam’s gold, in Libya with Libya’s massive 143 tonnes of gold stolen by NATO forces, in Ukraine with the US sending military cargo planes to airlift 33 tonnes of Ukrainian gold to US vaults, and with the same operations carried out in a few other nations as well. Afghanistan is the latest nation to suffer the same consequence of Western looting of their gold, with US Central Bankers stating that they have “frozen” Afghanistan’s near 22 tonnes of gold stored inside the vaults of the NY Federal Reserve, presumably underground at 33 Liberty Street and 580 5th Avenue in NYC, among other locations. If you want to know what the Western banking cartel is doing with this stolen gold, then just ensure that you subscribe to my rokfin.com/skwealthacademy platform as I will be making a podcast about this topic in future months.
However, the more curious question is why has the Western banking cartel been so interested in seizing as much of a “dead asset” as possible in recent years? After all, we are being told cryptocurrencies are the future and that gold is dead. In addition, why was JP Morgan so interested in trying to mine (and possibly steal) Afghanistan’s gold and risk an extremely dangerous venture in developing gold mining operations in Qara Zhagan in the Baghlan province during the US military occupation from 2001 to this year? If gold is so worthless, why would JP Morgan bankers risk human lives in trying to mine gold in Afghanistan and appoint a former SpecOps soldier, Ian Hannam, to lead the way? And despite the fact that at times during the occupation, US and NATO troops may have been able to force the Taliban, Isis and Al Queda out of Baghlan, the risk of terrorist attacks would always loom during any mining operations conducted inside Afghanistan. Never heard of this story?
Most people haven’t, but just because you never heard of it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. In 2010, the US Department of Defense secured for JP Morgan bankers a contract to start drilling for gold in the Baghlan province. Strange, because I have never seen “gold mining” listed on any JP Morgan’s public financial statements as an operational division of the company. Of course, as JP Morgan’s ventures into war torn Iraq proved, JP Morgan bankers never pass up on an opportunity to financially exploit a war torn nation. The venture organized to accomplish this goal was called Afghan Gold and Mineral company (AGM), my skepticism about the name, meant to promote an interpretation of Afghan ownership, likely in reality translated into 100% foreign ownership of all the spoils.
We do know, however, that Western interests knew about this gold decades before the US occupation in 2001, as Afghani locals had engaged in artisanal gold mining in many regions in Afghanistan on a very small scale and had been aware of the existence of gold in their mountains for ages. Dusko Ljubojevic, a South African geologist working for AGM, even admitted as much: “We know from the locals that there is gold and our own studies show good potential — now we need to explore further.” AGM had been reported as majority-owned by Sadat Nadari, a 36-year-old Afghan business tycoon that owned a supermarket chain and an insurance company in Kabul as well as various interests in construction, telecommunication companies and fuel distribution.
Sadat was also the former Afghani government Minister for Peace Affairs and former Minister of Urban Development and Housing that appears to have been misnamed as his exploits would have made him more appropriate to be the Minister of Financial Exploitation. Despite Afghani law prohibiting any senior government officials from bidding on mining contracts, Sadat did so anyway in clear violation of the law, and later resigned from his government positions to keep his mining contracts after public outcries of corruption. With great irony, Wikipedia describes Sadat as coming from a “spiritual” family, again showing how worthless Wikipedia is a source of factual information, as Sadat’s business exploits have exposed him as an exploiter of human capital and mineral resources of his own nation, not as some great “spiritual” leader.
As far as how much gold was stolen from Afghanistan by Western banking interests, mining under the cover of US military assets like watchful Black Hawk helicopters, this is unknown. The most I could find in my research was that of the unknown quantities of extracted gold, the Afghani government received “received little or nothing”. However, the credibility of this claim is in question, simply due to the fact that all information about whether this gold mine was developed and if any, or how much gold was extracted, seems to be classified information. Another article I discovered upon my research stated that the Afghanistan government nullified mining contracts before the development of the gold mine due to breach of contractual obligations that happened. However, due to the corruption of the Western installed puppet Afghanistan government that stunk to high heaven above and permeated the depths of hell below, a dissolution of the contracts, an event that happened at the end of 2019, did not mean that mining construction did not continue and that no gold was ever extracted from Afghanistan soil and secretly airlifted out of the country, with payments to the puppet government to ensure silence about any matters like this.
I was able to uncover stories on two incidences involving illegal gold mining operations in the Badakhshan province of Afghanistan that reported the deaths of four people in one incident and the deaths of thirty, with fifteen more injured in a second incident, earlier this year. However, given that a British company led by Ian Hannam had been given the rights to mine this gold by the corrupt Afghanistan government, God only knows if British contractors were overseeing this illegal gold operation or not. Again, to prove that the entire narrative about China gunning for Afghanistan’s $3 trillion of rare earth minerals is a completely political, biased narrative, the existence of these minerals has been known for centuries, not just discovered during the US occupation as the MSM lied and falsely reported. Based on geological surveys conducted by British geologists in 1890 and thereafter by Russians, Americans, Germans, and French, the knowledge of significant reserves of oil, gas, coal, silver, copper, lapis lazuli, gold and rare earth minerals has been known for decades to centuries of time, well before the US occupation started in 2001.
Thus, blaring headlines that ran more than a decade ago of a new giant “discovery” of lithium, copper, gold and other rare earth metals was a complete MSM lie as surveys had exposed the existence of these vast wealth of reserves decades earlier and as stated above, the Russians, Americans, Germans and French all had taken a shot at extracting them, with bankers like JP Morgan even getting their grubby hands into the game and taking a shot at this enormous pie. Historical archives from the times of Alexander the Great that are more than 2,000 years old document gold, silver and precious stones regularly being mined in the region of Afghanistan so to report, as the mass media has done, that these discoveries and this knowledge is relatively new, is a complete falsehood.
Furthermore, it has been known for hundreds to thousands of years that at least six of Afghanistan’s thirty-four provinces are rich in gold, with more gold believed to exist elsewhere within the nation as well. The fact that Western interests were extremely interested in developing these untapped gold reserves should exposes the gold is dead narrative as a complete ruse. The world’s largest copper deposit also exists in Afghanistan in the Sar-e-Pol province. So, while I agree that China should be condemned for cozying up to a terrorist organization like the Taliban in being able to extract these minerals, if these stories are true, it is hypocrisy of the utmost degree that the mass media kept their mouths shut when a whole slew of Western interests took their own shot at this treasure trove of minerals. No one in their right mind actually believed that any Western nation that for decades, attempted to extract these minerals from Afghanistan, would have given the bulk of these riches to the Afghan people and converted Afghanistan into Monaco, St. Tropez or Martha’s Vineyard. If gold is dead, they would have done so, but given the fact that it is not, their interest was likely of a completely national interest only.
Note how the fake narrative that reported, more than a decade ago, that a “2007 United States Geological Service survey appears to have discovered nearly $1 trillion in mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy” now has morphed from a $1 trillion “discovery” that was misclassified as a “discovery” into a $3 trillion treasure trove after it became clear that the Chinese would pursue its extraction after the US failure. This amount of resources was magically reclassified from $1 trillion to $3 trillion just recently in order to demonize China’s greed, even though the Afghanistan government had estimated the minerals’ worth at more than $3 trillion over a decade ago. When Western interests were still seeking to exploit the minerals, the Western media vastly downgraded the amount to only $1 trillion to downplay the greed of Western interests in exploiting the exact same vast Afghani mineral resources for which China is now being demonized.
This is not a matter of my taking sides with any nation over another for the intellectually and morally challenged. All nations are wrong in trying to extract mineral resources from another nation without the extreme wealth these resources represent benefiting the people in the nation from which the minerals are being extracted. It doesn’t matter if the nation is China, Canada, France, Australia, Germany, France, Russia, the United States, Turkey or any other nation. Wrong is wrong, but a hypocritical media never presents such information in this manner. The mass media will always demonize other nations for the exact same behavior undertaken by their own nations, and always excuse their own nations for the same repulsive behavior. This is the issue regarding which I have a problem, because framing of such issues in this manner is not only disingenuous, but it is morally reprehensible. There is zero doubt that these reserves had been known for decades prior to the US surveys conducted during the occupation, and that all reporting of a new “discovery” was entirely disingenuous. Perhaps, the only factual component of the stories that ran back then was that more advanced surveys had been able to put a more accurate financial estimate of the value of Afghanistan’s vast mineral resources.
In conclusion, if gold is dead and a useless asset, why are so many Western nations doing everything in the power to gather more, even taking high risks in unstable geopolitical, war torn nations to try to extract and export it? Furthermore, if cryptocurrencies are the future, and this is inevitable as often claimed by crypto maximalists, I’m still failing to see the tens of billions of Central Bank holdings of bitcoin or ether. In fact, the amount of holdings by all Central Banks, the BIS, the IMF and the World Bank together, is zero. Surely, Central Bankers, the most powerful bankers in the world are not so blind as to not identify an inevitable trend and would be buying btc and ether hand over fist for their balance sheets if their adoption worldwide was inevitable. Since the results of the most recent US geographical surveys remain an issue of national security, we will likely never know how much gold is in Afghanistan and how much gold may have been extracted and exported during the US occupation. But the one thing we do know, is that many Western nations were interested in Afghanistan’s rich gold reserves, and did their best to extract it, whether successful or not. Of all the Western expats already evacuated and now being evacuated from Afghanistan, I wish you Godspeed in your efforts to safely exfil. However, I really would like to know how many of them were mining industry employees, as the tens of thousands being evacuated couldn’t all possibly be interpreters for the NATO forces.
Please note that all skwealthacademy articles are always published first at the skwealthacademy news site. Please visit my news site to download my eBook, Can Cryptocurrencies Save the World?, free for a limited time, and to sign up for my free weekly newsletter. As I’m no longer posting any video content on YouTube, please sign up for a free membership here to continue to view and read my free content, or for a premium membership to gain access to premium content. For the most comprehensive premium financial analysis, including more detailed analysis about this article’s topic than provided above, consider joining my patreon platform at the Benefactor Level. You can also subscribe to my Rokfin platform here. Finally, after 16 months of covid travel lockdown, away from home during this entire time, I hope to be a free man again next month. If so, then I will be launching my 10-year blood, sweat and tears project, skwealthacademy, indefinitely delayed after a planned March 2020 launch. Please click here to download a just revised, updated skwealthacademy factsheet to learn more about my 22-course curriculum and read about why my Academy will radically alter the way we view education forever. If you would like to help with the launch, for which added bonuses will come your way, please visit my gofundme launch campaign here.
