Great post, Kgem. Some of the better newsletters state that the end-result of the engineered paper selling of gold in the West – incidentally accompanied by central banks that are mostly buying physical gold – is that a lot of  people with deep pockets in Asia, especially those in China, including the Chinese institutional investors, have been picking up large quantities of gold (and other pms) at these artificially low prices. One ultimate aim for the Chinese may be to work towards the yuan/renminbi becoming a gold-backed, internationally accepted currency. The policies of the Russian authorities are not much different from that either, in their clear preference for gold and a basket of different currencies (to supplant the US$ as international reserve currency) over the US$ alone.