Claims

The PBOC removed the requirement for permission to export gold out of China into Hong Kong—making it a purely customs matter—which effectively removes exchange controls on gold and provides crucial liquidity for the new Hong Kong gold market by allowing wealth holders to move gold between jurisdictions.

During the 1980s, Western bullion banks engaged in a gold carry trade—leasing gold from central banks at ~1% and investing the proceeds in US Treasuries yielding ~10%—but analyst Frank Veneroso documented that approximately one-third to one-half of the gold leased out never returned, having been absorbed into the market, likely purchased by the PBOC.

If the US transitions to a gold standard with the dollar collapsing, America will be in the same position as Germany was in 1920-1923 (Weimar hyperinflation), meaning some manufacturing might recover but only under deflationary conditions incompatible with current debt servicing.

Governments that tax savings, suppress interest rates to encourage consumption, and follow Keynesian stimulus undermine their own economies, while the 19th-century UK and Europe developed their industrial revolutions under gold standards without requiring Keynesian stimulus through stability mechanisms.

The Straits of Hormuz crisis (ongoing as of July 2026) has caused China to shelve or delay planned SGE gold vaults in Dubai, suggesting geopolitical considerations influence the pace and location of physical settlement infrastructure rollout.

The Western paper gold market is in structural decline as banks exit and the East builds a physical infrastructure network (SGE vaults, refining capacity), creating a two-tier system: the West's collapsing paper system versus the East's rising physical system.

Retail investors can store gold in jurisdictionally-diverse, insured private vaults through services like GoldRepublic, which provide ownership verification, transparency, audit access, and vault visitation rights—important due diligence requirements to verify the operator's legitimacy.

The episode took place on July 7, 2026, with the Hong Kong gold clearing system going live 'this morning,' indicating the episode is being published/recorded in real-time or near-real-time to a specific future date.

Russia could disclose much larger levels of gold in reserves than the 2,000-2,300 tons officially held by the central bank because of sovereign wealth funds that intelligence suggests hold something like 10,000 tons between the two principal funds.

Macleod rejects Keynesian economics, calling it 'rubbish'; he argues that export-import balances are a side issue and the real problem is when governments tax savings, discourage savings, or suppress interest rates to encourage consumption, which destroys the economy.

The Netherlands was particularly fortunate to retrieve approximately 1,000 tons of gold from the New York Fed, likely as a result of pressure from the Bundesbank's experience with retrieval delays.

If the yuan-gold price (once fixed) will go through the roof due to dollar collapse consequences, fixing it while there is still speculative trading would create a financial crisis in the Shanghai futures exchange; therefore, banks have been told not to open new futures positions.

China is planning for a future without the dollar—not just for itself, but for the world—and sees the collapse of the dollar coming fairly soon, with the ultimate goal being a gold exchange standard between the yuan and gold to replace the failing Western fiat currency system.

Russian government finances are in very good order—government debt to GDP is less than 20%, personal tax rates around 13%—and Russia can implement a gold standard tomorrow without the vulnerabilities that would constrain other economies.

China's PBOC has accumulated an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 additional tons of gold beyond officially declared reserves in recent years, giving the state total holdings of approximately 50,000 tons—representing 30 to 35% of global above-ground gold stocks—through a combination of official purchases during the gold carry trade era (1980s-2002) and recent aggressive acquisitions.

If Russia placed the ruble on a gold standard, Russian banks could lease gold from Western central banks at ~1% while earning a return of ~13% (current Russian interest rates) by shipping the gold to Russia and re-loaning it, creating an arbitrage that would immediately force Western economies to raise interest rates catastrophically or default, 'destroying the finances of Britain, France, and Germany completely.'

The US economy faces a slump due to the energy crisis (Hormuz disruptions) and will be unable to prevent currency destruction because the Fed will print money to support collapsing markets and bail out 'zombie' companies, inevitably destroying the dollar.

China's reversal of precious metals export policy—from suppression/export to aggressive imports of gold, silver, and copper—is evidence that the PBOC views the current moment as a crisis requiring immediate currency substitution, not a manageable normal-state adjustment.

The balance of trade deficit/surplus between nations is not determined by relative currency values but by differential savings rates; a nation with a 30-35% household savings rate (China) will run a trade surplus regardless of currency strength, while a nation with 7% savings (US) will run a deficit regardless of policy; hence a yuan gold standard would not make Chinese exports uncompetitive.

When one ounce of gold becomes equivalent to a million dollars (due to currency collapse), the volume traded in London becomes irrelevant because the currency's purchasing power is destroyed—leading to the practical death of the LBMA as a reference market.

In February 2026, the PBOC instructed its banks not to hold excessive US Treasury securities, which Macleod interprets as a signal to get rid of them entirely, not merely to reduce exposure modestly.

The US has no credible defense against a Chinese or Russian gold standard announcement: the US must first prove it hasn't disposed of its gold by consulting the Bundesbank, but the Bundesbank's 2012-13 attempt to retrieve 300 tons from the New York Fed was told it would take seven years, indicating the Fed does not actually have the gold to return.

The Deutsch mark remained consistently strong throughout the post-WWII period not because Germany suppressed it, but because Germans saved at high rates (30-35%), naturally constraining domestic demand and generating export surpluses.

China has stopped exporting chemicals like sulfuric acid and fertilizers that would earn dollars, as part of a comprehensive strategy to avoid dollar accumulation and force other nations to process their own ores, accelerating China's positioning as the global refiner of non-ferrous metals.

The Comex and London gold/silver futures markets are experiencing historic lows in open interest (not seen in 10-15 years), and this is driven not by lack of speculator interest but by banks actively avoiding dealing and quoting prices 'way out there' to exit the market despite still maintaining enormous short liabilities.

A ruble gold standard would strengthen China and Russia's economies 'enormously' and is therefore 'a must, whichever way you look at it,' but macroeconomists don't understand this because they lack historical experience with functioning gold standards.

Physical gold ownership should be stored outside the banking system and outside one's home jurisdiction, with private vaults in neutral jurisdictions (e.g., Switzerland) preferred to LBMA-affiliated storage, to minimize government access and confiscation risk.

China has shuttered leverage gold and silver trading on domestic markets to prevent speculation, while simultaneously encouraging gold accumulation accounts; this targeted approach stops speculative futures positions while encouraging stable investment.

The silver squeeze is 'only phase one'—industrial demand from manufacturing and refining will 'clean out silver liquidity,' and simultaneously investor demand (as individuals hedge away from devaluing fiat currencies) will create 'a huge great conflict between industrial demand and investor demand' in coming months.

Gold and silver premiums in Eastern markets have exceeded $20/oz in some cases, with large price differentials between East and Western spot prices, reflecting the market structural bifurcation and natural flow of physical from West to East where prices are higher.

The gold storage sector has experienced rapid expansion and growth scams as the gold price has risen from ~$1,000/oz in 2016 to $5,000+ recently, requiring extreme caution in selecting custodians and understanding their storage practices and security models.

In 1948, the United States had over 20,000 tons of gold, representing approximately 60% of above-ground global gold stocks; by 1971 when the Bretton Woods agreement was suspended, this had declined to around 9,000-10,000 tons.

~76% (or 75%) of China's silver does not come from mining but from refining copper, zinc, lead, and gold as byproducts; only ~25% comes from primary silver mining.

If the London physical market no longer has enough depth to offset COMEX short positions that banks maintain, the markets will collapse when this hedge breaks.

Sergey Glazev wrote an article 3-4 years ago in a Moscow business magazine about how it would be easy to put the ruble on a gold standard, which Macleod interprets as a signal that Russia's highest circles were thinking about this as a real option.

Russia's gold mining has accelerated substantially such that Russia probably now rivals China as a gold miner.

Media ownership has become highly concentrated, with five companies controlling 85% of U.S. media sources, while the top four companies control 90% of radio revenue and integrated ownership (production, distribution, exhibition) means fewer diverse voices control what culture is available.

After the FCC abandoned rules requiring separation between network ownership and content production in 1994, the proportion of prime-time television owned by network studios rose from 25% (1992) to 75% (2002), while the number of independent television production studios fell from 25 to 5.

In the same period that the RIAA estimates 2.1 billion CDs were downloaded for free, only 803 million CDs were sold (down 6.7% in revenue), suggesting that file sharing does not produce a one-to-one loss of sales and that a significant portion of downloading is sampling or access to otherwise unavailable content rather than direct substitution for purchases.

Western appliance brands like Electrolux and Indiset have all but disappeared from Russian shelves, replaced entirely by Chinese-made equivalents, with China taking the consumer goods market rather than using middleman arrangements.

The NY Arca defense index climbed more than 150% between 2020 and 2025, meaning the conflict premium was already baked into valuations before Europe announced rearmament.

You can keep a wartime economy looking healthy for a surprisingly long time by cannibalizing the civilian sector to make tanks and shells, but when rainy day funds hit zero and the last remaining major customer is bleeding your margins, you are not an independent empire—you are a subsidiary.

The Keel Institute characterizes Russia's situation as 'structural exhaustion,' which means the economy is running on fumes.

Russia's economy contracted 0.3% in Q1 2026 despite the government sharply ramping up spending, and Moscow cut its 2026 growth forecast to 0.4%—representing near-zero growth from a government that spent four years describing sanctions as basically decorative.

Russia's national wealth fund liquid assets have depleted from 6.5% of GDP at the start of invasion to 1.8% as of April 2026, meaning the rainy day buffer is mostly gone.

In March 2026, despite Europe announcing its biggest rearmament since the Cold War, the NY Arca defense index fell nearly 8% while the S&P 500 fell about 5%, with the defense sector underperforming the broad market.

Military spending in Russia is up while oil and gas revenue is down, and the shortfall is being covered by higher taxes, spending cuts on civilian sector, more borrowing, steady sale of reserve assets including national gold, and ballooning corporate debt driven by state-controlled banks ordered to flood military-related companies with cheap credit.

China now accounts for roughly 35% of Russia's total foreign trade, up from 16% before the war, making Russia a captive supplier with vast quantities of raw materials but only one buyer able to take them at scale.

Russian GDP per capita sits somewhere around $13,000 to $15,000 while the US number is north of $80,000, making Russia on a per capita basis about one-fifth as wealthy as the United States and America's poorest regions significantly wealthier than Russia.

The majority of chips entering Russia still come from Western brands like Intel and AMD, but the paperwork now routes the vast majority of them through China first, where Beijing charges a toll on Western technology rather than replacing it.