Must Listen! Silver Coins as Money - Ask The Expert – Hugo Salinas Price!

Hugo Salinas Price shares his views on precious metals, provides some historical background on gold and silver money, the manipulation of the precious metals markets, the inevitable collapse of the fiat money, and more…  

Click here for transcript and original posting

What is junk silver?

The idea is to first get started. Save four silver quarters a month dated before 1964.

Feb202015

Do you have a coin jug at home? Perhaps it isn’t a jug, per se, but a coffee can, glass jar, or maybe even an old fashioned piggy bank? It might be holding far more money than you realize!

If you spend much time surfing various survival/prepper message boards and other forums, you’ll no doubt run across the term “junk silver.” People want to know, “What is junk silver? And, should I buy it?”

The term refers to coins containing a high amount of actual silver, unlike most common coins minted today.

Here’s the cool part. If you have a coin jug at home, odds are you probably have at least a few junk silver coins in there. While you won’t see them every day, they do still crop up regularly.

What is junk silver?

Here in the United States, junk silver coins are basically any coin (except pennies and nickels) minted in 1964 or earlier. 

Given that half-dollars and other larger coins are somewhat rare in most of our daily lives, we’re basically talking about dimes and quarters. If a coin is categorized as junk silver, it does not have any numismatic value to collectors.

The value in junk silver is the silver itself, not the coin’s appearance.

The only silver nickels in recent history are the “wartime” ones produced in 1942-1945. Even then, they only contain about 30% silver, whereas most junk silver coins contain 90% silver.

If after looking at the mint date you still aren’t sure if the coin is silver, a silver coin sounds very different from a non-silver one when dropped on a table. The sound is hard to describe but once you’ve heard it, you’ll recognize it pretty quickly going forward.

Why do preppers focus on junk silver?

Why is it important to know about junk silver? Well, for starters, junk silver is a very easy way to get started with collecting precious metals for possible use as alternative currency, should there come some sort of economic collapse. It takes just a few seconds at the end of the day to examine the coins in your pocket before you dump them into your coin jug.

On top of that, junk silver coins are worth far more than their face value. Generally speaking, if you have $1.40 in face value of junk silver coins, you have one troy ounce of actual silver. As of this writing, an ounce of silver is going for about $18.00 or so. I use Kitco to check prices when I’m getting ready to buy.

Now, honestly, that’s not a completely true comparison as junk silver coins aren’t actually worth the full silver spot price. But, those dimes and quarters are worth a ton more than what you’d get from a candy vending machine.

At my house, we have two separate jars, one for pennies and one for all other coins. I’ll usually glance through my spare change, checking mint dates, before tossing the coins into the appropriate jar. But, because I’m human and might miss seeing a junk silver coin, we’ll have one of our children dump out the jar and check each coin before we cash in the change. Often, they’ll find one or two coins we missed. The junk silver coins are stored away under lock and key, just in case we need them someday. If nothing else, they’ll be nice for the kids to have someday.

Resources for junk silver

A Guidebook of United States Coins 2015

The Beginner’s Guide to Gold and Silver Scrap

How to Buy Gold and Silver Bullion Without Getting Scammed

Survival Mom: How to Prepare Your Family for Everyday Disasters and Worst Case Scenarios  (I include an interview with a precious metals dealer and information about buying junk silver.)

Wartime silver nickels

via survivalmom

A New Way to Hold Gold (2015 Update)

Posted on February 23, 2015 by Chris Martenson

What if you could carry and exchange gold in the exact same manner as you do with the dollar bills in your wallet?

Last year, we introduced the precious metals community to a company called Valaurum, which has developed a technology that’s making this possible.

Here’s the write-up from last year:

Democratizing Gold

In short, a fractional gram’s worth of gold is affixed to layers of polyester, creating a note – called an “Aurum” – similar in dimension and thickness to a U.S. dollar bill. This gold (usually 1/10th or 1/20th of a gram) is commercially recoverable. So an Aurum offers similar potential as a coin or bar, in terms of providing a vehicle for storing and exchanging known, dependable increments of precious metals – just in much smaller (and more affordable) amounts than commercially available to date.

The big idea here? In a world where a 1oz coin of gold costs over $1,200, an Aurum will let you hold a few dollars’ worth of gold in a single note. If you’ve got pocket change, you can be a precious metals owner.

And you don’t have to change your behavior. You can store and transport an Aurum in your billfold along with your dollars.

Understanding the Aurum

As the saying goes, a picture’s worth a thousand words. Here’s a picture of an Aurum designed for Peak Prosperity that the Valaurum team produced for us:

You’ll see that with even just 1/20th of a gram of gold involved, it’s enough to make the Aurum appear to be “made of” gold. 

The characteristic luster, color, and shine of the 24-karat gold used is immediately apparent.

The Aurum is designed to be handled in the same manner as we do with our “paper” money. And, despite having a more ‘plastic’ feel to it (resulting from the polyester backing), it’s as flexible, lightweight, and familiar-feeling as paper currency.

The big difference, of course, is that instead of being a claim on something else, it simply is what it is: a fractional gram of gold. It can be stored, traded, or melted down – just like a coin or bar.

Here’s a brief video that gives an overview of the production process:

Implications

Being able to hold gold in this form is significant for several reasons.

First, it makes gold ownership available to all budgets. Many of the world’s households have been priced out of gold to date. This changes that completely.

Second, it enables the potential for everyday transactions should we ever return to a precious metal-backed monetary standard. It answers the challenge: How will you pay for your groceries with gold? With an Aurum, it’s now easy.

Whether Valaurum’s product emerges as the winning horse or not, the world definitely needs this type of solution (i.e., convenient fractional physical metal) to go mainstream.

I’m very excited by this new innovation in the bullion industry, and I explore the matter in depth in this podcast [14]. If you’re similarly intrigued, it’s worth the listen.

The response to last year’s podcast was tremendous. It quickly became one of the most popular in Peak Prosperity’s history. If the description above interests you, and you haven’t listened to it already, you can do so by clicking here [14].

Big News

So, what’s happened with the aurum over the past year? Has the concept caught on with precious metals investors?

We’ve invited Adam Trexler back to the program to find out. In this week’s podcast, he shares with us a number of positive updates about adoption of the aurum, demand by the bullion dealer community, and product enhancement to the gold note itself.

But most exciting is this: a (small) sovereign central bank is deep in negotiations with Valaurum to replace its existing national currency with aurum notes, creating a true precious-metals backed monetary system. As best we know, this would make it the only one in existence in the world today.

If this indeed occurs, it could be a game-changer. Changes in trust and perception always begin with a non-conformist having the courage to depart from the herd’s consensus. Even a small country rejecting fiat money in favor of a gold standard will catch the attention of others. And as the current currency wars exacerbate, as they inevitably will, more countries will increasingly look to adopt monetary regimes that work better. 

Perhaps that will be a return to gold, in this new form.

More Big News

The Peak Prosperity aurum notes we printed up last year quickly sold out. Demand was much higher than we had expected.

For those who did not have the chance to purchase any — or for those who did, and are interested in collecting each new series that gets produced — we have good news: the new 2015 Peak Prosperity aurum (1/10th gram) is now available for purchase [15]. Those interested in doing so can learn more by clicking here [15].

And for those interested in the latest on Valaurum,  click the play button below to listen to my latest interview with Adam Trexler (31m:20s)

via washingtonsblog

Bitcoin: What It Is, Why It Matters - and What the Critics Say - Mises.org

February 14, 2015

Thomas E. Woods | Thomas E. Woods a senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, is the creator of Tom Woods's Liberty Classroom and author of eleven books, including the New York Times bestsellers Meltdown and The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and other titles.

via libertycrier

You Can't Create More Savings by Printing More Money

February 12, 2015 Frank Shostak

Savings has nothing to do with money. For instance, if a baker produces ten loaves of bread and consumes one loaf, his savings is nine loaves of bread. In other words, the “savings” in this case is the baker’s real income (his production of bread) minus the amount of bread that the baker consumed. The baker’s savings now permits him to secure other goods and services.

For instance, the baker can now exchange his saved bread for a pair of shoes with a shoemaker. Observe that the baker’s savings is his real means of payments — he pays for the shoes with the saved bread. Likewise, the shoemaker pays for the nine loaves of bread with the shoes that are his real savings.

What Is Savings?

The introduction of money doesn’t alter what we have so far said. When a baker sells his bread for money to a shoemaker, he has supplied the shoemaker with his saved, unconsumed bread. The supplied bread sustains the shoemaker and allows him to continue making shoes. Note that the money received by the baker is fully backed by his unconsumed production of bread.

Yet without the medium of exchange, i.e., money, no market economy, and hence, the division of labor, could take place. Money enables the goods of one specialist to be exchanged for the goods of another specialist. In short, by means of money, people can channel real savings, which in turn permits the widening of the process of real wealth generation.

Also, in a world without money it would be impossible to save various final goods like perishable goods for a long period of time. So the introduction of money solves this problem. Instead of storing his bread, the baker can now exchange his bread for money.

In other words, his unconsumed production of bread is now “stored,” so to speak, in money. There is, however, one proviso in all of this: that the flow of the production of goods and services continues unabated. This means that whenever a holder of money decides to exchange some money for goods, these goods are there for him.

Having Money Is Not the Same as Having Savings

Money can be seen as a receipt, as it were, given to producers of final goods and services that are ready for human consumption. Thus when a baker exchanges his money for apples, the baker has already paid for them with the bread produced and saved prior to this exchange. Money therefore is the baker’s claim on real savings. It is not, however, savings.

Now what about the case where money is used to buy unprocessed material — is the unprocessed material real savings? The answer is no. The raw material must be processed and then converted into a piece of equipment, which in turn can be employed in the production of final goods and services that are ready for human consumption. In this sense, the buyer of unprocessed material transfers his claims on real savings to the seller of material in return for the prospect that the transformed material, some time in the future, will generate benefits far in excess of the cost incurred.

Furthermore, the buyer of the material also buys time (i.e., by having the material readily available, he can proceed immediately with the stages of making the final tool). If the material weren’t available he would have to extract it himself, which of course would delay the making of the final tool.

Once real savings are exchanged for money, the recipient of the money can exercise his demand for money in a variety of ways. This, however, will not have any effect on the existent pool of real savings.

An individual can exercise his demand for money either by holding it in his pocket, or in his house, or by placing it in the custody of a bank in a demand deposit, or even in a safe deposit box.

Also, whether he uses it immediately in exchange for other goods, or lends it out, or puts it under the mattress, it does not alter the given pool of real savings. Thus by putting the money under the mattress, an individual doesn’t engage in the act of saving. He is just exercising a demand for money. What individuals do with money cannot alter the fact that real savings are already funding a particular activity. Whether individuals decide to hold onto the money, or lend it out alters their demand for money, but this has nothing to do with savings.

Whenever an individual lends some of his money he in fact transfers his claims on real goods to a borrower. By lending money, the individual has in fact lowered the demand for it. Note that the act of lending money (i.e., the transferring of the claim) doesn’t alter the existent pool of real savings. Likewise, if the owner of money decides to buy a financial asset like a bond or a stock he simply transfers his claims on real savings to the seller of financial assets. No present real savings are affected as a result of these transactions.

How Does Money-Supply Expansion Affect Savings?


Now let us examine the effect of monetary expansion on the pool of real savings. Since the expanded money supply was never earned, goods and services therefore do not back it up, so to speak. When such money is exchanged for goods it, in fact, amounts to consumption that is not supported by production. Consequently a holder of honest money (i.e., an individual who has produced real wealth), that wants to exercise his claim over goods discovers that he cannot get back all the goods he previously produced and exchanged for money.

In short, he discovers that the purchasing power of his money has fallen — he has in fact been robbed by means of loose monetary policy. The printing of money therefore cannot result in more savings as suggested by mainstream economists, but rather to its redistribution. 

This, in the process, undermines wealth generators, thereby weakening over time the pool of real savings. So any so-called economic growth, in the framework of a loose monetary policy, can only be on account of a private sector that manages to grow the pool of real savings despite the negative effects of the loose money policy.

We can thus conclude that savings is not about money as such, but about final goods and services that support various individuals that are engaged in various stages of production. It is not money that funds economic activity but the flow of final consumer goods and services. The existence of money only facilitates the flow of the real stuff.


via mises.org

Silver Eagles Not Best Way to Own Silver

Posted on December 18, 2014 by Pat Heller

The U.S. Mint charges $2 above the spot price when it sells regular silver American Eagle one-ounce coins to its handful of Authorized Purchasers. These APs are then responsible for the costs and logistics of picking up the coins at the West Point or San Francisco Mints. By the time most coin dealers get in a smaller supply of these coins from the larger wholesalers, retail customers could easily be paying $3-$4 per coin above the silver spot price to purchase a 500-coin box of silver Eagles.

The silver Eagle may not be the

 best way to own bulk silver

At those premiums, retail buyers would now be paying 15-20 percent or more above the intrinsic metal value of silver Eagles.


These coins have been hugely popular, with combined mintages since the series debuted in 1986 of more than 200 million coins. In absolute terms, even the lowest-mintage 1996-dated coins cannot be called rare.

It is possible to buy the old U.S. 90 percent silver dimes and quarters (and often half dollars) struck up to 1964 at a lower cost per ounce of silver content.  Privately manufactured silver rounds and ingots in sizes of 1, 10, and 100 ounces can also be acquired for a lower premium than silver Eagles.

So, are silver Eagles a good way to purchase bullion-priced silver?
There are a number of hard money writers who consider the silver Eagles to be the best option for buyers. Others, including me, consider their premiums to be too much higher than other options to recommend them. You can’t have it both ways, so whose advice is sounder?

The silver Eagles have multiple advantages where it is an exact one troy ounce of pure silver issued by a reliable entity.  It has legal tender status by having a $1 face value, which means that they can cross international borders almost everywhere around the globe without having to pay import taxes.

Do these advantages outweigh other options, where U.S. 90 percent silver coins do not come to an even ounce weight of silver per $1 of face value, or where the privately struck silver rounds and ingots are normally subject to import duties if they cross borders?

I place more emphasis on the cost per ounce of silver content, which is the main reason why I am not in favor of purchasing large quantities of silver Eagles as a way to own bulk silver. However, I realize that silver Eagles are beautiful works of art. Therefore, I don’t knock the idea of purchasing individual coins or even a roll or two to be part of a collection or to be given as gifts.

Instead, I favor lower-premium alternatives despite the popularity of silver Eagles, where my company alone has sold as many as 300,000 of these coins in a single year.

Many buyers of silver Eagles realize they are paying a higher price to acquire silver in this form versus lower premium options. A number of them have told me that they expect to be able to liquidate these coins at prices higher than what they would be paid for the rounds and ingots or U.S. 90 silver coins. If that is what really happens, then it is not such a downside risk purchasing silver Eagles today.

But – don’t count on being able to receive a payment per ounce of silver content any higher than you would be paid for the 90 percent silver Coins or rounds and ingots. Here is one example why I say this.

In late 1996, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway purchased 129.7 million ounces of silver futures contracts due in March 1997. As the maturity date neared, Berkshire Hathaway stated that they intended to take physical delivery of all the contracts rather than simply rolling the contracts over into new paper contracts with maturity dates farther in the future.

This quantity of physical silver demand severely strained existing supplies. Before Berkshire Hathaway announced that they wanted physical delivery, the spot price of silver was about $6. At that level, we were paying the public 50 cents under spot for the private one-ounce silver rounds and ingots and 50 cents over spot for silver Eagles.

Demand for low premium silver that the refiners could melt and form into deliverable 1,000-ounce bars to fulfill Berkshire Hathaway’s contracts pushed up the silver spot price.

By March 1997, the spot price topped $7. When silver reached that level, we were still paying 50 cents per ounce under spot to purchase one-ounce silver rounds and ingots from the public. However, since the refiners had no interest in purchasing any product even at spot price (the price at which they were being paid for the 1,000-ounce bars), silver Eagles did not appreciate at all during this run-up in the spot price. When silver reached $7 per ounce, we were then paying 50 cents per ounce below the spot price to purchase silver Eagles.

In this instance, the spot price of silver rose about 14 percent. The price we were paying the public to purchase one-ounce rounds and ingots rose 18 percent. Yet, the price we were paying for silver Eagles was unchanged.
As demonstrated by this example, I don’t recommend the purchase of silver Eagles as a way to acquire a quantity of bullion-priced bulk physical silver.

Incidentally, the rumor that circulated afterwards was that Berkshire Hathaway granted an extra six months to the short-sellers of the silver contracts, but the sellers had to pay the company 50 cents per ounce for the additional time.

Patrick A. Heller was the American Numismatic Association 2012 Harry Forman Numismatic Dealer of the Year Award winner. He owns Liberty Coin Service in Lansing, Mich., and writes “Liberty’s Outlook,” a monthly newsletter on rare coins and precious metals subjects. Past newsletter issues can be viewed at http://www.libertycoinservice.com. Other commentaries are available at Coin Week (http://www.coinweek.com and http://www.coininfo.com). He also writes a bi-monthly column on collectibles for “The Greater Lansing Business Monthly” (http://www.lansingbusinessmonthly.com/articles/department-columns).His radio show “Things You ‘Know’ That Just Aren’t So, And Important News You Need To Know” can be heard at 8:45 a.m. Wednesday and Friday mornings on 1320-AM WILS in Lansing (which streams live and becomes part of the audio and text archives posted at http://www.1320wils.com).  

via numismaticnews

The Economics of Tipping - Kenneth A. Zahringer

Mises Daily: Wednesday, November 12, 2014 by Kenneth A. Zahringer
 
My dinner companion sounded indignant. “It’s a shame we have to tip the waitress,” she said. “The restaurant owner ought to pay the staff enough to live on.”

I imagine that is a common attitude among those steeped in our current cultural climate of envy and dislike of economic success — the anti-capitalist mentality, as Mises put it. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that we tip waiters out of sympathy, due to their misfortune of having to work in an industry full of greedy restaurant owners who won’t pay a “living wage.” In fact, tipping is an elegant market solution to a particular set of circumstances, often present in service jobs, that makes determining an appropriate wage extremely problematic. The practice of tipping used to be more common, applying to many more service positions than at present, when it is largely restricted to waitstaff and skycaps. Part of the reason for its partial demise is just the wandering course of economic change, but many jobs that used to be paid primarily by tips came to be covered by minimum wage legislation and simply disappeared.

So why do we tip? At first glance it seems rather odd that a waiter should be paid by two different people — employer and customer — for the same job. But in fact we, as tipping customers, are paying for a very different aspect of the waiter’s job than is the employer. The restaurant owner needs a way to get the customer’s order to the kitchen and the food out to the customer. Most anyone who can walk a straight line and operate a pencil can perform that task. 

But the restaurant owner also wants happy customers, and customers are happy when they have a waiter who can solve problems, handle special requests, and generally make their meal a pleasant experience, and that is a special skill set indeed. Coordinating these two different, and not closely connected, aspects of the job is what tipping is all about.
 
Information Asymmetry

The employer wants happy customers, but he has a twofold information problem. As a practical matter it is difficult for him to observe interactions between waitstaff and customers. In addition, the customers’ expectations regarding the quality of service are impossible to observe. This is further complicated by the fact that staff members are heterogeneous; they are different in terms of skill levels, personalities, and other characteristics that affect the customer’s experience of quality service. Thus the employer doesn’t have the information he needs to arrive at an appropriate wage for each member of his staff. The customer, however, is a participant in these interactions and as such has as complete information as is humanly possible. If the customer pays the server directly for that aspect of the job, the decision of the appropriate pay is made by the person with the most information about job performance.

Incentive Alignment

Employers generally want their employees to give their best, and presumably are willing to pay for that. However, the aforementioned information problem inhibits his ability to do so. Ideally, tips make the server’s compensation directly proportional and immediately responsive to the quality of service provided. This aligns the employee’s incentives with the employer’s; both now want to provide high-quality service to the customer, each for their own benefit.

Risk Sharing

Hiring a new employee entails risk. For the new employee, there is the risk that the job may not turn out as he had hoped. It could turn out to be a dead end with no future, or unsatisfactory in innumerable other ways. The employer, however, has a financial risk. The new employee’s skill set is unknown to the employer to at least some degree, regardless of how thorough the interview process might be. There is even more uncertainty with an inexperienced new hire; there is no history for the employer to work from. The employer has to pay the agreed upon wage, and if the new employee doesn’t perform as hoped he is losing money. If the new employee accepts a lower guaranteed wage and makes part of his compensation contingent on performance — the tip — this relieves risk in two ways. First, the employer is more willing to take a chance on a young, inexperienced worker. If the wage is lower, the minimum performance level needed to make the employee worth the wage is also lower. 

Second, since the employee can increase his earnings directly and immediately by improving his performance the job is not so much of a dead end. The low paying job becomes a valuable stepping stone, allowing the young, inexperienced employee to learn job skills, establish a performance record, and move on to something better. (It should be obvious that minimum wage legislation short-circuits this entire arrangement, making the employer much less willing to hire someone unless he is certain they are worth the higher wage. This is how lower-skilled individuals get shut out of the job market. But that’s the subject of another essay.)

That is the magic of the market. Even mundane habits like leaving a tip for a waiter play an important role in social cooperation and coordination. It is an elegant solution to a knowledge problem, developed spontaneously through the actions of a myriad of market participants. When left alone, people are pretty darn resourceful.

via Mises.org

Commodity Prices in US Dollars 1831-1881, Gold @US$20.67

All prices for all commodities were remarkably stable during this period in which gold was fixed at US$20.67 per ounce by the US Treasury from the time of our country's founding. Gold remained at that price until Congress surrendered its authority to the Federal Reserve in 1913. So, an ounce of gold would have exchanged for 20 silver dollars. This means of commerce would have been accurately termed a "Gold Coin Exchange Standard", and NOT a "gold standard", as the money was in the hands of the people. 

Note particularly the surge of commodities in gold terms, especially cotton during the US Civil War (1861-1865 + military occupation until 1877) and the North's blockade of the Confederate southern ports. What had been the cotton price range of .06-.10 gold cts/lb suddenly powered ahead to over .55 in 1863. Mark this down in your history textbook margins as the first unprovoked and US Constitutionally unlawful invasion (Mexican War excluded) by the United States of a foreign and sovereign nation.

Keep this in mind as we come up on the Fed's 100 year anniversary this December.

For Larger View

Banks Keep Billions of Taxpayer Bailout $$ For Forex Probe Fines

Why is it we just know that no senior executive will do any meaningful jail time? And, commensurately the defense of “I was only following orders” will be the appeal of their underlings. When a government supervises the ‘oversight’ of itself the people never win. Not only do the guilty skate, but they’ll use our own money for their escape! Without any political party warranting our trust, ‘lamppost justice’ is beginning to come into focus.

Remember, loyalty and obedience to any political party should not be confused as misplaced patriotism for your country. The German people learned that lesson (for a while) with their adored leader of national socialism, didn’t they.

WIN-WIN suggestion: Small business owners begin offering their products and services for physical silver coins. Offer to redeem for a 1% higher premium than larger dealers of your prospective customer’s choice! This not only gives you a method to accumulate honest money, but deprive the banking crooks of your sweat and reward. 

Give pause a moment to ponder what if this method of doing business began to take hold!? It’ll start right here, with you. Don't create a woulda-coulda-shoulda experience for yourself and find your nose pressed to the window looking in.

If this makes sense to you, please share this post with anyone you know who would benefit - buyer or seller.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Linette Lopez Nov. 7, 2014, 10:18 AM

Wall Street has been bracing for a billion-dollar currency manipulation investigation that will be over in a few weeks, says The Wall Street Journal.
In the past few weeks, it seems banks have been scrambling to prepare for whatever regulators on both sides of the pond may find after a fairly boring earnings season. Performance was average to slightly below, and the total trading rout banks expected didn't turn out to be that bad.

But then the disclosures started coming.

First Citigroup revised its earnings down to $0.88 per share from $1.07 per share to add $600 million to its legal reserves.

Then JPMorgan Chase also disclosed that US and UK regulators were conducting criminal (the Department of Justice is in there) and civil probes into its Forex trading operations. Of course, it's cooperating, but it has no idea how much it could lose in such a settlement — maybe nothing, maybe $6 billion.

Finally, on Thursday after the closing bell, Bank of America followed Citi and revised its earnings down by $400 million, adding that to its legal reserves to deal with whatever comes of the probe.

So here's what we know about the investigation: Barclays, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland Group, UBS, Citigroup, JPMorgan, and Bank of America are all involved.

Regulators will be charging these banks with failing to stop their employees from manipulating a specific currency exchange benchmark rate. There will be transcripts of their activity (always the most interesting part).

The UK banks will take about $1.8 billion of fines for this, but regulators in the US haven't finished negotiating. The DOJ hasn't finished its civil and criminal investigations either, and those may not be done until next year.
So in the meantime, save up.

via businessinsider

Licorice Ice Cream from Maine

I only include this post as I grew up at Rummel's Ice Cream. My bedroom was the 2^nd floor facing Silver Street, and brother's next brace of windows facing the front lawn. The house was said to be built in 1826. 

I don't believe I ever knew the author Maureen, but she did a stupendous job!

Bill Rummel

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

August 26, 2013 by Maureen

I'm from Maine – a rugged sort of place that requires its citizens to be tough.  You have to be tough to get up and go to work when the temperature is 25 below, snow's five feet deep and the wind is blowing a gale.


Maine is beautiful.  The first time my Aussie husband visited Maine, we'd just come from our home in Victoria in southern Australia where we'd been in drought for about 7 years and he said, "Sure is green!"  Everything in our world was brown and here was this mass of green as far as he could see (he had his head glued to the window of the plane).

The contrast between where I lived and where I was from was striking.  We lived along the Murray River in Australia – one of Australia's biggest river systems and there in Maine we were walking along the banks of the mighty Kennebec River in Winslow.  John said he'd never seen so much water in a river before.  During the worst of the drought we could have walked across the Murray River.


People in Maine talk funny.  They have different words for common things.   Mainers hang aht on their walls, walk down the road apiece, stand in the doah yahd, eat wicked good chowdah, put their buhdados down cellah and describe things in a cute way.  "It was so fricken cold, even the lobstahs were wearin mittns."

The word good has two syllables and the iconic word that suits just about any occasion for a Mainer is "ayuh."

When I was 16 I got a part-time job across the river in Waterville at Rummel's Ice Cream in the summer.  It's been sold to Gifford's now but the building is the same. When I worked there, the Rummel family lived in the house.

I scooped ice cream, made sodas and sundaes and worked the snack bar where we served lobster rolls, hamburgers and deep fried hotdogs.  Those were weird but I loved them.

"I'd like two lobstah rolls ta go," didn't sound odd way back then.  Now it makes me laugh.

Rummel's also had licorice ice cream and it was my all-time favorite.  It was the sort of ice cream that turned your tongue black so you couldn't pretend you hadn't eaten any and if you spilled any on your white uniform – busted!  It didn't wash off very easily.


I didn't care.  I ate it anyway.

My father was a dedicated strawberry ice cream man.  I'd get a cone of licorice ice cream and my dad would roll his eyes and say, "Anyone that would eat that would eat shit off a rusty spoon, Maureen."  He also said 'jumpin judas on a rock' when he got really angry too.

A few weeks ago I was reminiscing about my childhood and told John I wanted to make some licorice ice cream – for old time's sake.

He wrinkled up his nose as if to ask, "Do you HAVE to?"
"Will you make me some vanilla or chocolate?  I don't think I can eat black ice cream and I'm not fond of licorice."

He's incredibly spoiled.  He was the baby of the family and spoiled from the day he was born.  When he was young his sister would dress him before waking him up so his mother wouldn't yell at him for missing breakfast (again).  I must be guilty of spoiling him too because I made vanilla ice cream too.


When I finished the licorice ice cream and it was in the container, I put the container inside a ziplock bag.  

Someone on the interwebs said if you put it in a plastic bag, the ice cream would never get too hard to scoop.  

Nonsense I thought but guess what?  It worked!  It was solid but scoopable.  I always put a piece of baking paper directly on top of the ice cream as that prevents any freezer burn or ice crystals forming on the top but I'd never tried the baggie idea.  Brilliant.

If it's been a long time since  you licked the side of a licorice ice cream cone, why not try this recipe.  John's dad and I loved it.  Black tongues and all.

4.8 from 12 reviews
Licorice Ice Cream



Prep time
15 mins
Cook time
20 mins
Total time
35 mins

One of my favorite things to eat as a kid was licorice ice cream. Now I make it at home.


Author: Maureen Shaw
Recipe type: Dessert
Cuisine: American
Serves: 6
Ingredients

1 cup milk

¾ cup sugar

dash salt

5 egg yolks

1 tsp licorice flavoring or 113 grams (4 oz) black licorice candy

2 cups cream

Instructions

1.    Into a medium saucepan, add the milk, sugar, salt and licorice candy if using and heat to nearly boiling (and the licorice candy is melted).

2.    While milk is heating, whisk egg yolks til frothy.

3.    While whisking briskly, slowly add ⅓ of the hot milk and then add the egg mixture back into the pan of hot milk.

4. Reheat the mixture until the custard coats the back of a wooden spoon - don't overcook or you'll get scrambled eggs.

5.   Remove from heat and add in licorice flavoring.

6.    Chill for several hours or overnight. Add in the cream and freeze in your ice cream maker according to manufacturer's directions.

Source