While public officials may be ignoring the continued deterioration of our economy, job losses to the tune of hundreds of thousands of people weekly, and the unprecedented demand for government emergency support services like unemployment insurance and food assistance, Americans who sense uncertainty in the air are flocking to the safety of physical resources. Our first point of interest is a recent report from the Federal Reserve that indicates some $114 billion dollars in cash was withdrawn from the nation's largest banks in the last thirty days. Those holding their money at bailed out financial institutions are understandably concerned because the government's $250,000 deposit insurance guarantee program, originally implemented to restore confidence in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, expired at the end of 2012. That and the US fiscal situation has never been worse, with one Obama official recently having said the solution to the country's woes is to simply kill the dollar. According to the mint, investors purchased nearly half a billion dollars in gold and silver in the last 30 days. There was, in fact, so much money shifting into physical precious metals in January that the mint was actually forced to cease operations because they couldn't meet demand. A massive 7.4 million Silver Eagles were purchased from the U.S. Mint in January, considerably higher than the previous record from early 2011. At 140,000 ounces, the Mint has also sold the most ounces of gold in January in almost three years, suggesting the rising 'currency wars' are stoking people's ongoing rotation from paper-to-physical assets as their 'wealth' slowing loses its value. Why You Should Buy Gold and Silver People against the New World Order will often be interested in investing in gold and silver—particularly physical gold and silver—meaning they purchase coins or bars that they themselves take physical possession of, rather than just buying gold or silver stocks or certificates. The reason for this is because gold and silver are seen as real money, as opposed to a fiat currency like the US dollar. A fiat currency is a currency that isn't backed by gold or silver. Before 1971 the US dollar was backed by gold which meant that for every dollar in circulation, there was one dollar worth of gold in possession by the federal government or the Federal Reserve Bank. This was a way to keep inflation low since the gold supply only slowly increased, so then would inflation. But in 1971 President Nixon took the US dollar off the gold standard, meaning the Federal Reserve could print money and put it in circulation that was not backed by gold, so the rate of inflation was no longer connected to the amount of gold in existence, but rather to the number of dollars the Federal Reserve wanted to print. For decades, patriots and those in The Resistance had worried that the Federal Reserve Banking System, which is controlled by a group of private banks operating as if they were a government entity, would one day make the US dollar practically worthless because it would print so many of them it would create what is called hyper-inflation, thus destroying the value of the currency as was seen in the Weimar Republic in Germany in the 1930s, and recently in Zimbabwe, Africa where the inflation rate was so high that a bunch of bananas cost literally billions of Zimbabwe dollars. Since the year 2000 gold has went from $300 an ounce to over $1100 an ounce in the beginning of 2010. Silver has went from $5.25 an ounce to $18 an ounce in the same timeframe. Some market analysts predict that gold will hit $2000 an ounce sometime into the 2010 decade, and others are even predicting $5000 an ounce. Much of the increase in the price of gold and silver isn't because the metals are getting more rare, but rather the price is a reflection of the weakening US dollar. Gold and silver have been seen as a hedge against inflation for decades and most financial advisers recommend that 10% of a person's investments should be held in gold
