There’s GOLD under them thar streets!

There might be a new Gold Rush in…  Florence, Alabama?  A Georgia man claims that there’s gold buried under the streets of the North Alabama town, and if the local powers that be will let him dig it up, he’ll split the booty:

---

Roger McWhorter told the City Council on Tuesday during its work session that he has invented an electronic device that uses a radio signal to detect buried treasure. He said he was first attracted to Florence and the surrounding area because he is interested in the legend of Hernando DeSoto's lost treasure, reportedly left somewhere in the region during the Spanish explorer's 16th century trek through the South.

Since McFarland Park is owned by the federal Tennessee Valley Authority, McWhorter, of Hiawassee, Ga., proposes to dig beneath an unnamed city street to retrieve what he believes to be an old treasure, and split what he finds with the city.

City Council members were decidedly noncommittal about the offer.

McWhorter described his device as a harmonic molecular resonance transducer, which deionizes the ground around buried treasure and allows him to determine whether a treasure is still buried. He said the device can scan a five-mile region.

“I got a terrific signal back near McFarland Park,” he said.

…

Council President James Barnhart said he would ask the city attorney about the request, but in the meantime, he is concerned about public property.

“A representative of the media is here tonight. What I'm worried about is tomorrow,” he said. “People could start coming to McFarland with shovels and start digging it up. I know what happened during the gold rush.”

---

Awesome!  Harmonic molecular resonance transducers must be the absolute latest in treasure huntin’ technology, because a Google search of the phrase (in quotes) turns up the linked news story (and soon, this blog post) as the only references.  How many machines in the world can deionize the ground around buried treasure?

Geraldo Rivera sure coulda used one of those contraptions when he was digging around Al Capone’s Vault.

Note that McWhorter doesn’t seem to be claiming that there is a gold deposit in the area.  He’s claiming that Hernando DeSoto buried a cache of treasure in the region just before his death in 1542.  Though its most likely that upon his death, his men would have promptly returned to dig up the dead man’s gold, legends in the area persist that some goodies were left behind.

Might as well fire up that harmonic molecular resonance transducer and start pokin’ around, because for the last 450 years or so, nothing else has turned up so much as a gold tooth.

The fact that according to historians and maps of DeSoto’s expedition, the closest he came to Florence was somewhere south of…  Tuscaloosa just gets in the way of a good story.

Gimme some feedback in the comments.

Weiner McCarthy-ing Goldline and Glenn Beck

Via JammieWearingFool.

This is truly pathetic. It ranks right up there with Chuck-U Schumer's rant against $25 carry on bag fees and Henry Waxman's trumped up "investigation" of companies announcing chargeoffs after Obamacare passed. But Weiner doesn't seem to think that Americans are very smart. I'm not a Goldline customer and only an occasional listener/viewer of Glenn Beck. I am however, quite conservative. Right-leaning talk radio listeners are among the most highly-educated and intelligent audiences in media.

I honestly don't know what Weiner hopes to gain from this little charade of his. The people who hate Glenn Beck and other conservative talkers sponsored by Goldline aren't going to hate them any less strongly than they already do, and the people who buy hard assets do it because they're willing buyers in an open market. If anything, stunts like this only drive more listeners and viewers to the subjects of the controversy, which increases ratings and draws more advertisers like Lear Capital, for example.

Extra Point: I'm hesitant to put money in any asset trading at or near its all-time high. It doesn't mean that it's not going higher, but if a global financial crisis does strike, the most likely event will be a flight to the safety of US dollar denominated assets. That would drive the dollar higher and could cause a bit of a gold bubble burst.

Chart of the Week: Gold vs US Dollar, 2002 - 2010

This week's chart:  A plot of gold prices versus the US Dollar from 2002 through 2010.  Click the image for a larger view. Gold is a traditional hedge against inflation.  A "loose" monetary policy is a central bank strategy of increasing the money supply over time to sustain employment and output levels, but not so much that runaway inflation destroys wealth.  A sustained increase in gold prices vis-a-vis the dollar indicates that, over time, investors are worried about erosion in value of dollar denominated assets.

Obama's pick for the Federal Reserve Board's #2 spot, Dr. Janet Yellen, is widely believed to be a "dove" on inflation, which means that she believes employment and output are at least as important as controlling inflation when setting monetary policy.

I'm not a goldbug, but I do have a nice collection of rare coins and other hard assets, whose value trends similar to gold.