Gold & silver

Fiat money continuously devalues in terms of it purchasing power due to the supply being inflated by government printing, and more significantly, by banks lending it into existence. Historically a sure sign of a fiat system coming to its end is the rise in price of gold as the people start to lose faith in the system and run back to something of real and stable value. However, the banks and other large players in the fiat system have figured out how to keep the price of metals severely suppressed to maintain the illusion of faith in their system. This method is not the "spoofing" of orders and other Wall Street shenanigans we see every week in the news, it's a much larger system of manipulation hiding in plain site - it's the fractional reserve bullion banking system. The amount of bullion being traded every day is more than what is mined in a year! Only a tiny fraction of the gold traded in the LBMA and COMEX markets actually exists. The bullion banking system is exactly like the fiat fractional reserve banking system causing rampant inflation through lending paper metal into existence, thus devaluing the existing real physical supply. I wonder if this is how they'll also handle Bitcoin?

Under the LBMA definition, an "unallocated" gold account is one in which the customer merely has a claim on the bullion bank account provider for an amount of gold. The bullion bank in turn has a liability to the customer for the same amount of gold. Importantly, in the LBMA system, the customer is an unsecured creditor of the bank. Gold trades are settled using the "loco London" mechanism which simply means a quoted price is for a trade which settles using unallocated gold "delivered" in London, i.e. the trade settles using the London Gold Market system of unallocated gold accounts and clears though the unallocated London Precious Metal Clearing System (LPMCL). The standard for the metal that an unallocated balance represents is theoretically defined as 995 fine gold in London Good Delivery Bar format. However, nothing is actually delivered under unallocated trading, i.e. there is no physical transfer of anything between the parties to the transaction. The transfer is merely a book entry.

	Banks treat their metal deposits in much the same way as they do deposits denominated in money, as the reserve asset against which they lend additional money to borrowers.
	— CPM Group