[Destroyer]

Just one thing to keep in the back of everyone's mind.
Stewart Dougherty is a shill for Kitco ...sellers of gold and other precious metals. He's employed by them.

I don't care how "prestigeous" Mr. Dougherty's credentials are. I looked at his "bio" and see that it is on Kitco's site. I look at what he "does" and he appears to be just another guy that can't get a regular job so hanges out a shingle and calls himself a "consultant." [I have seen lots of consultants job titles lately.] I am not impressed about MCI and in any case that was a decade ago. How has he been feeding himself lately?

You were able to read him because Bart Kitner [the man that owns Kitco] paid for you to be able to do so. Bart is a Canadian, as is his company. Their US address is a "storefront" up near the Canadian border. Much of his "holdings" are on paper in places like Hong Kong, Singapore, and Perth. If something were to go wrong, the legal fees on that trail would not be trivial. At least one of his firms is incorporated in British Columbia, CA - Very long noted as a haven for very sketchy businesses. [My father purchased shares in a mining company there that turned out to be a non producing sand pit.]

Bart is in the business of making a profit from selling metal. He in turn is also one of the reasons that Google is nicely profitable. He pays very well for "placement" in their search engine - multiple times over in fact. That's a lot of overhead and gold is not normally a high margin item. How does he make a profit? The answer is that he uses marketing - Mr. Dougherty - to sell product. But there is also something subtle here. He sells undivided interest in a pool of metal. You never get to hold that in your hand. It only exists as paper/pixels and is no more secure than any other financial [Wall Street] instrument. If you're going to buy gold, MAKE SURE you get the gold, NOT just paper.

I'm NOT saying that Mr. Dougherty is wrong in his message or in his facts..far from it. But just keep in mind that it appears that he's getting paid to say it... and to me, when someone gets paid to say something, it makes me look twice at the message.