Barry Stuppler

An audit by Treasury’s Inspector General’s Office of the Federal Reserve’s NY vault gold and a L.A. Times story on the audit may be misleading, an economist maintains . . . .

The U.S. government’s gold in New York is safe in a vault underneath Manhattan, and some of the precious metal there is purer than previously thought.That’s according to a first-ever audit conducted last year by the Treasury Department of U.S. gold on deposit at Federal Reserve banks in New York and elsewhere . . . .

What a debacle! The G7 issues a rare statement on exchange rates that is intended to calm growing fears of an international currency war. Then they immediately turn around and start bickering amongst themselves about what it really meant . . . .

Did you hear the U.S. Mint just ran out of silver? In mid-January, the Mint suspended sale of the 2013 run of its popular U.S. “Eagles.”

The new silver Eagles sold out fast. They went on sale, and buyers bought everything they could lay hands on. Within days, the shelves at the Mint were stripped bare. It’s not the first time that this has happened . . . .

Central banks are not exactly short of things to worry about right now.The euro may well be on the road to a chaotic collapse, taking some of the world’s biggest banks with it. A currency war may break out between Japan, the U.S. and Europe. Printing money has run out of steam, but there is still little sign of the global economy returning to the kind of growth rates it saw before the credit crunch.

But in the long term what they should perhaps be most worried about is losing their monopoly on issuing money . . . .