Attleboro jewelry company gold operations

Company processes 7 tons of gold per year. Continuous casts 22-karat sheet for US Mint coin blanks. Mint owns the gold; supplier alloys, rolls, returns; Mint stamps and coins. Used as a high-end progressive-die example. Tom digresses on the 1933 gold standard and Ron Paul's monetary policy.

Most of the stuff I've seen in progressive dies — if you go down to Attleboro, the jewelry capital of the world — I used to consult for a company that went through seven tons of gold a year. They had three or four continuous casting machines for gold, and they make the gold sheet stock, which I think is 22 karat, that they send to the US Mint. They don't own the gold, the US Mint owns the gold. They receive it, they alloy it from 24 karat down to 22 karat, they roll it out into sheets, send it back to the Mint, and the Mint stamps it out into little circles and then coins it. That's where you get these collectors — $20 gold pieces, which actually have about $800 worth of gold in them. They're 22 karat gold. But the Mint is trying to make money. We can't have gold coinage anymore since 1933 or so — right after the Depression we went off the gold standard. Ron Paul will tell you about that, and why we shouldn't have done that. I don't know what Ron thinks about the gold standard, but a lot of people with Ron's type of monetary policy — I'm not knocking that policy. I think we overspend. I think it's going to come back to kill our grandchildren or maybe even us.