Aggregated Awareness

From Bloomberg comes this recently released piece of data regarding gold mining production outputs for 2010.

In first place, with a reported 341 metric tonnes of gold produced, was China. And with the Chinese having imported another 300 metric tonnes in 2010, takes their reported consumption of gold to just below 650 tonnes for 2010. Since they consume all of their production internally in China.

We noted in yesterday's The Australian, in an article by Paul Cleary, that a topic that we had extensively researched and covered back on the 6th November 2010, got notable coverage in Rupert Murdoch's The Australian newspaper with the above headline used in that story.

A couple of weeks back, we posted the US Fed Data Dump. It contained some very interesting information, to say the least.

Not only did we find out that the Reserve Bank of Australia received a total of US$53.175 Billion, or A$77.262 Billion, from the US Fed between September 2008 & April 2009 via the Central Bank Liquidity Swap (CBLS), nor that NAB & Westpac were receivers of the Fed's largesse between January 2008 & July 2009, to the tune of US$4.5 Billion and US$1.09 Billion, respectively. But we have some more totals, for the various US Fed funding facilities, to now report.

Please see the table we've compiled below.

From Zerohedge comes information overnight that the US Fed has at last broken through the US$1 Trillion ceiling, that's $1,000,341,000,000 to be more precise, in US Treasury bond holdings.

Not being satisfied with recently getting to the No. 1 spot to surpass China, as the top holder of US Treasury bonds, the Fed, with "the Bernank" as figurehead, is now openly following in Gideon Gono's path with no end in sight at this time.

Some highlights from the King World News Blog Interviews with some illustrious names in the precious metals world being interviewed, and as always, the interesting non-mainstream data points that comes out of such interviews & commentaries

Here are 4 recent KWN blogs focusing on such commentaries:

• Jim Sinclair: This is late 1979, Gold will rise violently
• James Turk: US$53,957 in Circulation for Every Ounce of Gold
• James Turk: US$400 Silver by 2013 - 2015
• Ben Davies: Financial Oppression

From the People's Daily in China comes this little tidbit of the sorry saga that is, over-indebted governments & their ballooning public debts & unfunded liabilities. This time, the focus is France.