I feel like an old soldier, having already endured so many of these battles. They happen because gold is undervalued, which means that it is being exchanged for dollars at too cheap a price. So gold tries to correct this imbalance in a normal market response by climbing higher, but is prevented from doing so by the gold cartel. It is these confrontations that have led to the recurring battles.

I think we can learn from these head-to-head clashes. There are lessons from the past that can be disheartening at times like this when the gold price gets repeatedly repelled from $700. It is important to recognize that every time gold and the cartel have battled in the past, gold eventually won.

For example, back in March 2001, I wrote the following about the Battle for $272:

"Open interest on Comex calls in the last few days has risen by 16,000 contracts. That's 1.6 million ounces, or nearly 50 tonnes. Who would be willing to take the risk of selling these calls with gold so cheap? Probably the same central banks who have been manipulating the price. They are still trying to keep the gold price under their thumb. Will they succeed yet again? There's the rub. No one knows. The markets may be getting ready to 'throw away the key', but maybe not. While we know that gold is unbelievably cheap and eventually going higher, we just don't know when.

"Watch the $272 level. Gold probed that level today, but backed off, though still closed up over $5 on the day. If $272 is hurdled, the long awaited rally may be finally underway. And it also may be the rally in which those who have been manipulating the gold price are finally forced to throw in the towel, just as they were forced to do so the last time the price of gold was being manipulated, which was in 1971."

The price of gold eventually broke through the lines the gold cartel had mobilized at $272, and climbed higher. But the gold cartel staged a retreat, and eventually we got the War for $325. So significant was $325 that I wrote the following in March 2002

"If you are old enough to remember when President Nixon closed the 'Gold Window' on August 15, 1971, you have an advantage over those who did not experience that event and the subsequent rise in the gold price. We are at, I believe. a similar moment in time. Maybe we are only at the equivalent of January 1971, or perhaps as close as August 1, 1971. We just don't know for sure how close we are to the launch date, but the important point is that the launch date is indeed coming."

It took another 6 months, but $325 was indeed hurdled, on December 6, 2002. So important was that battle that I continued to write about $325 for months. For example, I penned the following in February 2003:

"For the past six years of this 20-plus-year consolidation, gold traded under $325. During this period gold moved out from weak hands into the strong hands that were accumulating it at those bargain basement levels. To make that base even more convincing and technically significant, we had a selling climax in the middle of that base when gold was dumped after the Bank of England announcement, causing it to reach a low of $252 in July 1999. As the BoE began its dishoarding, those who recognized that gold was undervalued (us included) were buying while the BoE was selling.

"Then with the breakout above $325, gold's base was firmly in place. This base defines the bottom in gold prices. Time will tell of course, but I don't think we'll ever see those prices again. Just as gold never looked back when it started its final break away from $35 in the early 1970's, gold is again not looking back. $325, $330, $340 and probably even $350 - those gold prices are history and won't be seen again. Again, only time will tell, but my scenario from here is quite clear.

"Because gold is moving higher from such historically undervalued levels and because so many people have been left standing on the platform when the gold-train started pulling away from the station with the break above $325, it is onward and upward for gold from here."

And so it was. But then came the battles for $420, $450, $500, and since last May, we have been fighting the Battle for $700. Gold will win this time too, but again, we are frustrated and irritated that there is even a battle at all.

Who is the gold cartel? And what are they trying to accomplish? The gold cartel is an alliance of governments and a few bullion banks. This group is led by the U.S. government. Though their aims are different, their congruent interests put them on the same side. Here's what they are trying to do.

The US government wants the US dollar to continue as the world's reserve currency. But the dollar is no longer worthy of holding this privileged position. It is not sound money that can be used reliably in international commerce. It is being inflated and debased, which are actions that erode its usefulness as currency. It is also being used as a political tool, which again makes it unreliable money for cross-border commerce.

So the US government has a problem. Gold has always held the position of international money, and currencies only became reserve currencies because they were "as good as gold", which is what the dollar used to be. Now, however, gold and the dollar are competitors, with the result that a rising gold price shows how badly the dollar is being managed. This reality decreases the demand for the dollar, making it more difficult for it to remain unchallenged as the world's reserve currency.

Consequently, the US government wants a low gold price to make the dollar look good. Its strategists believe that a low gold price will make people think the dollar is being well managed, which obviously is a necessary precondition for anyone to continue using it. After all, if people truly understood how vulnerable the dollar is to a collapse, the demand for the dollar would decline even more rapidly than it is already declining.

Most other governments within the US orbit work toward the same objective. Though they may be envious of the dollar's privileged position, in the end they accept it because these other governments are also fiat money advocates. By keeping the dollar-monetary system functioning, they can also perpetuate the myth of fiat money by creating their own currencies 'out of thin air', thereby enabling these governments to do what all governments want, namely, to use newly created fiat currency to preserve their own position of privilege and power.

Their aims are clear, but governments don't directly trade in the gold market. They enlist the help of the bullion banks, but not all of them of course, just the 2 or 3 largest ones in order to keep the cabal as small as possible. After all, the bullion banks stand to make fortunes by working with the government, and they obviously don't want to spread this profit around needlessly to other banks that are not needed in the price manipulation scheme.

The bullion banks make money in two ways. First, they earn the contango. In other words, by being short at all times, they earn the interest income available from gold. It works like this.

Because gold is money, its future contracts always trade at a higher price than the spot gold price. This is called contango, and is the opposite of every other commodity. Because they are not money, other commodities trade in backwardation, meaning their future contracts always trade below the spot price, except in abnormal circumstances, for example, where supply is disrupted by an unforeseen event.

So by being short the contango, bullion banks are always selling gold for future delivery above the spot price. If the spot price is unchanged or lower when those future commitments come due, the bullion banks make money on the difference between the price at which they sold and the spot price on the due date. But if the spot price is higher, they lose money, so clearly the bullion banks do not want a rising gold price.

The second way bullion banks make money is by what I call "picking the market's pockets". There are a number of ways they do this. For example, because they execute the government's trades, they know when large amounts of gold are going to be dumped into the market as part of the gold's cabal's price manipulation scheme. So the bullion banks "front run" those trades by selling first, and then profit from the price slide that occurs when the big government order is dumped on the market. So in essence the bullion banks are strapping on a feed-bag by working with the government.

It can be discouraging when viewing this state of affairs. However, we should instead focus on the important parts, which are that gold is in a bull market that is now more than six years old and that notwithstanding this fact, gold remains undervalued. Or to put it another way, the dollar is overvalued.

Sell the dollar and buy gold because the Battle for $700 will end the same way the other battles have ended; gold will win the battle. The gold cartel is losing the war. In the end, the market is bigger than the government.

Regards,

James Turk
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

Note: James Turk is the Founder and Chairman of GoldMoney.com. Since 2001, thousands of individuals and companies have used GoldMoney® to buy gold to protect their wealth from today's financial uncertainties.

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As a major trading nation, the U.S. exports computers, software, movies, and food, among many other things. And it imports just about everything you can imagine. When the U.S. buys more than it sells, it makes up the difference-known as the trade deficit -by shipping dollars overseas. And in recent years it has been buying a lot more than it's been selling. After averaging a manageable USD $80 billion annually during the 1980s, the trade deficit soared into the USD $300 billion range in the 1990s. And by 2003, this figure had exploded to over USD $500 billion. That's about 5% of GDP, a level that, when it has occurred in other countries in the past, has preceded a sharp decline in the value of the local currency.

Why is America buying so much more than it's selling? One reason is that it's a lot cheaper to make most basic products in places like China, where smart, highly motivated people will work for about a tenth of the prevailing U.S. wage. So U.S. companies, in order to take advantage of this differential, are closing factories here and setting up new ones over there. Powerhouse discount-store chains, Wal-Mart especially, are driving the process by buying from a growing network of Chinese plants, passing some of the savings along to customers, and either driving competitors out of business or forcing them to buy from cheap foreign sources as well. As a result, low-wage foreign factories are now flooding the United States with incredibly cheap stuff, much of which used to be made in the States. And where not so long ago U.S. trade with China was more or less in balance, it now runs a deficit that exceeds USD $100 billion annually.

But the imbalance goes beyond just China. America is running annual deficits with Japan and the European Union of more than USD $100 billion and USD $50 billion, respectively. And of course, oil imports, mostly from the Middle East, seem headed nowhere but up. The inescapable conclusion is that U.S. consumers are addicted to a lifestyle that includes new cars, big houses, and slick electronic toys. And, as you know the U.S. is willing to borrow whatever it takes to avoid cutting back.

Looked at from virtually any angle, the U.S. trade situation is unprecedented. The annual trade deficit is larger than the budgets of Social Security and the military, and twice as big as Medicare. Since 1953, America's manufacturing base has declined from 30% of GDP (when the U.S. had a trade surplus, by the way) to about 15% today. Since 1985, the cumulative deficit has grown to about USD $4 trillion, or about USD $13,000 for each man, woman, and child in the U.S.

What are America's trading partners doing with these dollars? Their central banks have been accumulating huge piles of dollars as "reserves" to support their own currencies, while foreign businesses have been buying U.S. real estate, stocks, and bonds. Foreign investors now own about USD $8 trillion of U.S. financial assets, including 13% of all U.S. stocks, 24% of corporate bonds, 43% of Treasury bonds, and 14% of government agency debt. By the end of 2003, about a third of Fannie Mae's mortgage-backed bonds were being sold outside the United States. In the 1980s, the U.S. was the world's biggest creditor nation, meaning that we had far more invested in other countries than those countries had invested here. But by 2003, foreign investors owned USD $9.4 trillion of U.S. assets, while U.S. claims on the rest of the world were only USD $7.2 trillion. The United States is now the world's biggest debtor nation.

This willingness of foreign investors to recycle their dollars back into the U.S. economy explains the dollar's stability in the 1990s. And as long as they stay willing, the supply and demand for dollars will balance, and its stability will continue. But what if foreigners change their mind and decide not to buy U.S. assets? It seems that we're about to find out. Foreign direct investment-that is, the dollar value of U.S. assets bought by foreign investors-fell from USD $300 billion in 2000 to USD $135 billion in 2001, and then to less than USD $100 billion in 2002 and 2003. And the dollar, suddenly, began to struggle. In 2003, it fell by about 20% versus the euro and yen, and by 30% versus gold.

But 2003 was just a warm-up. Though foreign investors recycled fewer dollars, they still bought USD $80 billion of U.S. assets and ended the year with a bigger stake in the U.S. economy than ever before. What happens if they decide to actually start selling their Treasury bonds or Manhattan real estate? In all probability, the dollar will weaken further, causing foreign investors to look elsewhere for opportunity, causing the demand for dollars to dry up. America will have a rout on it's hands, and the debt problem will go from potential to very, very real.

One cause of the U.S. trade deficit is that Europe and Japan are growing more slowly and buying relatively little from abroad. Why the difference in spending patterns? Because they have serious problems of their own. Beginning with Europe, when France, Germany, and their neighbors replaced their national currencies with the euro, they laid down a few ground rules in an agreement known as the Maastricht Treaty. Among them was the requirement that no Eurozone country could run a deficit exceeding 3% of its GDP. But the treaty didn't specify how they should achieve such fiscal prudence. It certainly didn't force member countries to cut spending or adopt rational labour laws or business regulations. So Germany and France (again, following the standard currency script) kept their massive welfare states and debilitating regulatory regimes and simply hoped that a common currency would make their economies productive again.

It didn't, of course. Both economies, hamstrung by bloated governments and high taxes, have been more or less in recession since 2000.

And their budget deficits are consistently above the Eurozone limits, which puts them at the same crossroad as the United States: They can either cut spending and live with the consequences, or they can continue to spend too much, run ever-higher deficits, and print however much ?at currency is needed to cover the difference.

By mid-2003 it was clear that they, like the United States, had chosen the second road. Though the 3% of GDP deficit limit is written into the Maastricht Treaty, French and German leaders dismissed it as a mere "symbol." And both signalled that henceforth they would pursue growth rather than austerity. As one news account put it in July 2003, "The French appear to have seized on Germany's difficulties to push for an overhaul of the pact, which they view as an obstacle to President Jacques Chirac's spending plans."

The European Central Bank, meanwhile, has been following the U.S. Federal Reserve's lead, cutting interest rates to the lowest levels in decades.

Japan, the world's second-biggest economy, has been mired in a slow-motion deflation since its real-estate and stock-market bubbles burst in the early 1990s.The culprit: massive bad debts on the books of major Japanese banks that no one seems to know what to do with. If the banks write them off, they'll be left with too little capital to finance new loans, and whole sections of Japan's construction and financial sectors, currently dependent on bank credit lines, will implode. If the banks allow the loans to fester, the country will continue to stagnate. In a vain attempt to kick-start the economy, the central bank of Japan has cut short-term interest rates all the way to zero-that's right, loans cost nothing over there. And the Japanese government has tried one stimulus program after another, in the process accumulating a national debt that, as a percent of GDP, is more than that of the U.S. Now the government - whose credit quality has already been downgraded by the big debt-rating companies-is considering bailing out the country's ailing banks by buying the bad loans, packaging them into bonds how the U.S. securitisation machine does this, and selling them on the global markets with some kind of government guarantee. And last but not least, the new Bank of Japan governor, Toshihiko Fukui, has suggested that he will, like the U.S. Federal Reserve, start buying longer-term Japanese bonds if necessary.

Japan also has a problem that's the mirror image of the U.S. trade deficit. Because it runs a gargantuan trade surplus with the rest of the world, it has to manage a huge influx of dollars. It could simply let supply and demand work, which would result in the yen rising in value against the dollar. But that would hurt Japan's exporters by making things priced in yen more expensive. And since exports are about the only thing that works for Japan right now, the country's leaders are reluctant to let this happen. So the central bank has been buying dollars, thus accumulating a massive dollar-reserve position. To buy dollars they have to spend yen, which means they're running their own printing presses out.

So here we are. The world's major economies are all living far beyond their means and are borrowing to cover the difference. And they will, it now seems certain, continue to create as much new currency as it takes to delay the day of reckoning. The stage is set, in short, for a currency collapse a la Weimar Germany or 1990s Argentina, in which the world simply loses confidence in the dollar in particular and currencies in general. In such a "flight from currency," the demand for dollars will dry up. The U.S. will spend it's cash the minute it comes in, sending prices through the roof (in dollar terms). America will shun financial instruments, including bonds and many stocks, like the plague. And we will return en masse to the only money that is impervious to government mismanagement: gold.

Regards,

James Turk
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

Editor's Note: James Turk has specialized in international banking, finance and investments since graduating in 1969 from George Washington University with a B.A. degree in International Economics.  He is the author of two books and several monographs and articles on money and banking. He is the co-author of The Coming Collapse of the Dollar (Doubleday, December 2004). In addition, James Turk is the Founder and Chairman of GoldMoney.com.

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This change will lessen the demand for dollars, which will cause the value of the dollar to drop. Strike one.

The second strike is the U.S. ban on melting and export of coin.

The U.S. Mint implemented a new regulation that bans the melting down and exporting of pennies and nickels. It is sound economics to harvest the metallic value of these coins, because the value of their base metal content is greater than the coin's face value. Here's what Lee Rogers, editor of the Funny Money Report, says about it. His analysis is spot-on:

"They [i.e., US Mint officials] claim that they are imposing these rules because they don't want certain individuals who melt down coins taking advantage of the American tax payer. It isn't the people who are melting down the pennies and nickels that are taking advantage of the American taxpayer. Those people are just trying to protect themselves from the stupidity of the Federal Reserve that continues to destroy our currency. The Federal Reserve is the very reason why the melt value of these coins has risen beyond their face value. Federal Reserve Notes have lost over half of its value in terms of gold and silver since 2000 because they have dramatically increased the money supply over this period of time. The Federal Reserve has taken advantage of the American taxpayer, not the people who are melting down these coins. It is complete rubbish that the U.S. Mint would make scapegoats out of individuals who melt their coins to be the ones who are screwing over American taxpayers. The press release should be blaming Alan Greenspan for taking advantage of American taxpayers because he was responsible for creating the excessive amount of credit that has since decreased the value of the currency.

What is going on with pennies and nickels is an exact repeat of what took place in the late 1960's. Back then the U.S. Mint made melting silver coins illegal. At that point in time the melt value of silver coins became worth more than their face value. As a result, these coins began to disappear from circulation because people realized what was happening and kept them. Why would people use a coin to pay for something if the face value of it is worth less than the melt value? That's why the coins stopped circulating. I believe that the same exact thing is going to happen to the currently circulating forms of pennies and nickels."

The entire article in the Funny Money Report is worth reading. It also includes the press release by the U.S. Mint announcing their new regulation.

There are many lessons that we can garner from monetary history, but one of them is unmistakable. When debasement becomes so extreme that even the base metal content of circulating coins is greater than the coin's face value, that country's currency is headed for the currency graveyard and will soon be buried there. Strike two.

The third strike, increasing government control.

There is a corollary to the lesson from monetary history explained above. When a government interferes with commerce by imposing restrictions, commerce suffers. These restrictions impede economic activity, and that is a bad outcome because it is economic activity that is the backbone of society as each of us strives to meet our needs and wants.

There is perhaps no better account of this principle than the one penned in 1912 by Andrew Dickson White in his classic book, Fiat Money Inflation in France, which describes the horrific monetary debasement the French people suffered prior to Napoleon. He explains the adverse consequences that are caused by government controls and how successive controls by the French government inflicted increasing damage to that country's economy. White's book is essential reading for everyone, and can be downloaded for free here.

We have this week seen the principles expounded by White at work. The Thai government announced the implementation of foreign exchange controls, and one immediate response was the stock market there dropped 15%. Untold and unknown at this early stage is how severe the repercussions will be on that country's capital flows, both domestically and in its relations with the rest of the world.

Lest you think the actions taken by the Thai government are an isolated event that could not happen in Europe or the United States, I suggest you read this article published 3 weeks ago in the online version of London's Daily Telegraph.

While acknowledging that "currency controls" would be the "nuclear option", the article says that "Brussels may lawfully freeze capital flows in and out of the EU, and within it, and that this could be done by a "qualified majority" of EU finance ministers." It goes on to say that this authority is already in place in Europe and was granted "to enable Europe to stem the rise of the euro if the dollar goes into free fall, the underlying argument being that Washington should not be allowed [to] export the consequences of its own reckless spending policies through a "beggar-thy-neighbour" devaluation. The idea was to stop money coming in, though it could equally be used to stop money leaving." The really interesting question is why would the EU want to stop money from leaving?

Simple. If capital controls are imposed, they would come with compliance from other countries, particularly the United States and Japan, which would impose controls complementary to those implemented in Europe. In other words, though the above quote implies that the EU would pursue its own interests, the reality is that these countries' central banks are joined at the hip. Therefore, it is likely that the United States and the EU (with Japan as well) would pursue a common agenda. Namely, they would drop the value of their fiat currencies more or less in concert so that they all end up losing purchasing power against gold and other tangible assets, but more importantly, these currencies would drop in unison against the Chinese yuan. In this way the yuan's exchange rate would rise, in theory bringing down its trade surplus and also reducing the investment money flowing into China. It seems probable that the EU may justify taking this dire step toward capital controls on the spurious grounds that they need to prevent their monetary union from unravelling. So strike 3 is against the U.S. dollar, the euro and Japanese yen.

In summary, the outlook for the U.S. dollar is worsening, which is a conclusion that can also be reached by looking at what happened during last week's trip to China by Treasury secretary Paulson and Fed chairman Bernanke. They came home empty handed, without any concessions from the Chinese or commitments by them to help the United States by continuing to hold dollars, which the United States is recklessly spewing throughout the world as a consequence of its ongoing trade deficits.

Regards,

James Turk
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

Editor's Note: James Turk has specialized in international banking, finance and investments since graduating in 1969 from George Washington University with a B.A. degree in International Economics.

He is the author of two books and several monographs and articles on money and banking. He is the co-author of "The Coming Collapse of the Dollar" (Doubleday, December 2004).

In addition, James Turk is the Founder and Chairman of GoldMoney.com.

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No asset, including gold, exists in a vacuum. Stocks, bonds, real estate, and precious metals all compete for the same limited pool of capital, which means that for gold to be attractive, its prospects must be not just good, but better than those of, say, growth stocks.

One way of making this comparison is the Dow/gold ratio, which computes how much gold it takes to buy the Dow Jones Industrial Average of major American stocks. As you can see from the chart below, this relationship has been rather volatile.

In 1971, gold was $40 per ounce ($1.28/gg) and the Dow was 890, meaning that it took about 22 ounces of gold to buy the Dow. Nine years later, less than one ounce would buy the Dow. By the end of 1999, the two had diverged once again, with gold at $279/oz. ($8.90/gg) and the Dow at about 11,497, for a Dow/gold ratio of 41, far higher than its early-1970s peak. But note that this time around, both numbers in the ratio have an extra zero. That's because of inflation. A dollar purchases today what 10 cents purchased in 1971, so we need 10 times as many dollars to buy an ounce of gold or the Dow Industrials.

A Dow/gold ratio at the high end of its range implies two things. First, if historical relationships hold, gold is more likely to rise versus stocks in coming years than to fall. Second, the distance between the 1971 high and 1980 low gives a hint of how far gold can run this time around, especially with the financial gale now at its back.

One of the shocking things about gold is how little there is of it. In our sometimes frantic 4,000 years of searching, we've found perhaps 135,000 tonnes. Today, the world's entire hoard of gold would occupy a single (admittedly very heavy) cube 60 feet on a side - equivalent to the volume of three good-sized houses or the bottom 10 percent of the Washington Monument. To put this in perspective, the U.S. produces about 240,000 tonnes of steel each day.

But unlike steel, where production can be expanded by simply building more factories, the supply of gold increases only when we find and mine new deposits. Since 1492, there has never been a year in which the world's above-ground gold stock increased by more than 5 percent. The nineteenth-century average was about 2 percent, which is one reason that inflation was nonexistent for gold-standard currencies: The world's money supply was constrained by nature to a low-single-digit growth path. Although gold no longer circulates as currency, it still has both monetary and commercial uses. The demand from these sources is estimated at around 4,000 tonnes each year. The output of the world's gold mines is currently about 2,500 tonnes, creating an annual supply shortfall of more than 1,500 tonnes, or approximately 50 million ounces.

For most commodities, a supply/demand imbalance of this size would cause either the price or the level of production, and probably both, to soar. But commodities are consumed after they're produced, and gold, remember, is not just a commodity. Gold is money, which, once discovered, tends to be hoarded. So the vast bulk of what has been mined is still around, and the current deficit is covered by owners of previously mined gold. Central banks, as you know, sell and/or lend millions of ounces per year, which, together with other forms of "dishoarding," like people selling their jewelry and gold coins, fills the gap. So while an annual supply shortfall of 50 million ounces is clearly a positive, absent a big jump in demand, aboveground stocks of gold are more than sufficient to make up the difference. In other words, current mine production is far less important for gold's exchange rate than are trends in demand.

Another positive in the short-term forecast for gold is on the demand front, things are looking up, thanks to the emergence of Asia's sleeping giants. The whole world is setting up factories in China, both to exploit its cheap, highly motivated workforce and to gain access to a billion new consumers. This is bad news for U.S. and European factory workers, but for China, the result is an embarrassment of riches, including a trade surplus that exceeds $100 billion a year with the U.S. alone. By the end of 2003, China's foreign exchange reserves - mostly in the form of dollars - exceeded $400 billion. And Chinese leaders, showing an historical savvy currently lacking in the West, were eyeing gold. Beijing is rumored to be buying much of the gold Western central banks are selling (and considerably more than the annual 100 tonnes it reported to the International Monetary Fund the past two years).

In 2002, Beijing removed the Communist-era ban on its citizens owning gold. In a survey quoted in the Hong Kong edition of China Daily, 20 percent of Chinese respondents said they were willing to move 10 to 30 percent of their savings into gold. An analyst quoted in the same story put the resulting increase in gold demand at about $36 billion, or about 300 tonnes annually.

India, meanwhile, is attracting almost as much foreign capital as is China, and in October 2003 ended a four-decade ban on bullion trading. Because India has traditionally been a huge market for precious metals (much of the gold mined in the West already ends up in Indian safes or adorning Indian women), the combination of rising incomes and more liberal ownership rules should have the same effect there as in China.

How will this suddenly much wider gap be filled? It's possible that central banks - which, as you'll see shortly, are more concerned with minimizing gold's exchange rate than maximizing the value of their gold reserves - will step up their sales. And they'll certainly try to talk the exchange rate down through anti-gold propaganda. But neither will do the trick, because government resources - of both gold and public credulity - are limited. Much more likely is that gold's exchange rate will rise until the rest of us start converting our jewelry and coins into dollars.

Regards,

James Turk
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

Editor's Note: James Turk has specialized in international banking, finance and investments since graduating in 1969 from George Washington University with a B.A. degree in International Economics.

He is the author of two books and several monographs and articles on money and banking. He is the co-author of "The Coming Collapse of the Dollar" (Doubleday, December 2004).

In addition, James Turk is the Founder and Chairman of GoldMoney.com.

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