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The news that a mystery bank has just pawned the family jewels gave traders a jolt – nervous about the sudden transfer of almost 20pc of the world’s annual gold production and the possibility of a sell-off.

In a tiny footnote in its annual report, the bank disclosed its unusually large holding of gold, compared with nothing the year before. The disclosure was a large factor in the correction of the gold price this week, which fell below $1,200 for the first time in more than a month.

The circle is now complete: in “saving our financial system,” the public borrowed trillions and transferred the money to private Power Elites, who then buy the public debt with the money swindled out of the taxpayer. Then the taxpayers transfer more wealth every year to the Power Elites/Plutocracy in the form of interest on the Treasury debt. The Power Elites will own the debt that was taken on to bail them out of bad private bets: this is the culmination of privatized gains, socialized risk.

Some 300 retired and current federal agents — representing the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement — collectively invested tens of millions of dollars of retirement money in what turned out to be a Ponzi scheme allegedly run by a Florida man who committed suicide last month, an attorney in the case said.

The FBI and the Securities and Exchange Commission are now investigating and trying to recover funds.

“There are definitely [agents] who have lost their life savings,” Fort Lauderdale attorney Michael Goldberg, who is representing the victims, told AOL News.

The reaction of the agents? “Pretty much what you expect,” Goldberg said. “Shock and anger.”

Behind it all, authorities said, was a self-described retirement investment adviser named Kenneth Wayne McLeod, 48. For years McLeod served as a trusted adviser to federal agents around the country, making free financial projections for retirement and in some cases offering high-yield returns of 8 to 10 percent on certain investments, according to an SEC filing in the case.

On June 22, McLeod was found dead in Jacksonville, Fla., of a gunshot wound.

His Florida-based companies, Federal Employee Benefits Group Inc. and F&S Asset Management Group Inc., appear to have been shut down and all assets frozen, authorities said. Calls to both numbers went unanswered this afternoon and the voice mails were full.

McLeod allegedly mentioned to prospective clients the names of many federal agents he knew, including straitlaced FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, according to the website Gang Land News, which reported on the story today.

“[McLeod] would tell people that Bob Mueller was a friend of his,” a retired FBI agent told Gang Land News. “The guy was a real charmer. He would say that he and Bob were best of friends and that Bob and his wife used to stay at his place all the time. The worst thing about this is that this creep scammed hard-working GS-13s and GS-14s [federal employees].”

Mueller did in fact rent vacation properties in Amelia Island, Fla., for several years, Gang Land News reported. But Michael Kortan, the chief FBI spokesman, said in a statement that even if McLeod had owned one of those properties, Mueller had no idea who he was renting from.

“The director had no personal or professional relationship with Mr. McLeod, nor did he engage in any financial dealings of any kind with him,” Kortan stated.

According to the SEC, McLeod for years put on retirement seminars that federal agencies paid as much as $15,000 for. He offered some investments with such companies as Fidelity, which the FBI said appeared to be safe. But others investments appeared to be fraudulent.

In many instances, he offered high returns — 8 to 10 percent — through bonds.

“The security of the government bonds was a key element of McLeod’s deception but he never purchased any bonds,” the SEC said in a statement on June 25. “Instead, he used the investors’ retirement savings to conduct a Ponzi scheme, to pay himself and to pay for lavish entertainment, including annual trips to the Super Bowl for himself and 40 friends.”

FBI special agent Jeff Westcott of the Jacksonville, Fla., office, which is investigating the matter, told AOL News that McLeod had “an air of credibility.”

The irony and embarrassment of the case are clear to many agents around the country. And at the SEC, the unusual set of circumstances is not lost on officials.

Toyota, the world’s largest seller of hybrid autos, in May said it would invest $50 million in Palo Alto, California-based Tesla and jointly develop electric models with the startup. Both prototypes are modified Toyota vehicles, said JB Straubel, Tesla’s chief technology officer.

States are reducing funding to public universities by as much as 6 percent this fiscal year compared with last, Moody’s analysts led by Dennis Gephardt wrote in a report dated today. Institutions rated A2 and A3, five and six steps below the top grade, face the greatest risk of downgrade, New York-based Moody’s said.

“Many U.S. public universities face dramatic declines in state funding on a scale that surpasses past experience,” the analysts wrote. States spent a combined $90 billion on public universities in fiscal 2009, which amounted to about 30 percent of the revenue at the institutions, down from 50 percent two decades ago, according to Moody’s.

The oldest of these wells were abandoned in the late 1940s, raising the prospect that many deteriorating sealing jobs are already failing.

The AP investigation uncovered particular concern with 3,500 of the neglected wells – those characterized in federal government records as “temporarily abandoned.”

Regulations for temporarily abandoned wells require oil companies to present plans to reuse or permanently plug such wells within a year, but the AP found that the rule is routinely circumvented, and that more than 1,000 wells have lingered in that unfinished condition for more than a decade. About three-quarters of temporarily abandoned wells have been left in that status for more than a year, and many since the 1950s and 1960s – even though sealing procedures for temporary abandonment are not as stringent as those for permanent closures.

As a forceful reminder of the potential harm, the well beneath BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig was being sealed with cement for temporary abandonment when it blew April 20, leading to one of the worst environmental disasters in the nation’s history. BP alone has abandoned about 600 wells in the Gulf, according to government data.

There’s ample reason for worry about all permanently and temporarily abandoned wells – history shows that at least on land, they often leak. Wells are sealed underwater much as they are on land. And wells on land and in water face similar risk of failure. Plus, records reviewed by the AP show that some offshore wells have failed.

Asked in multiple requests over several weeks how often abandoned wells have failed, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged Tuesday – as this story was being released – that it has had to deal with leaks at abandoned wells in shallow state waters of Louisiana and Texas. The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement – which oversees wells in federal waters – also acknowledged Tuesday that it has dealt with “a few” failed abandoned wells farther out in the Gulf. But the information was released only through the public affairs offices and neither agency provided experts for follow-up.

Experts say abandoned wells can repressurize, much like a dormant volcano can awaken. And years of exposure to sea water and underground pressure can cause cementing and piping to corrode and weaken.

Whether it is their residence, a second home or a house bought as an investment, the rich have stopped paying the mortgage at a rate that greatly exceeds the rest of the population.

More than one in seven homeowners with loans in excess of a million dollars are seriously delinquent, according to data compiled for The New York Times by the real estate analytics firm CoreLogic.

By contrast, homeowners with less lavish housing are much more likely to keep writing checks to their lender. About one in 12 mortgages below the million-dollar mark is delinquent.

Shipments will be capped at 7,976 metric tons, down from 28,417 tons for the same period a year ago, according to data from the Ministry of Commerce yesterday.

Rising production of hybrid cars and music players such as Toyota Motor Corp.’s Prius and Apple Inc.’s iPod have driven up demand for rare earths even as China cut the quotas to shore up prices and ensure domestic supplies. The U.S. is looking at building a trade case on the restrictions, industry representatives said last month.

And while business has ebbed a bit compared with last year, it remains four times what Cage saw before the recession.

“I think we picked up 15 (planes) that were $1 million or more, including one $20 million jet,” says Cage, president of International Recovery & Remarketing Group in Orlando, reflecting on the past 12 months. “We’d never picked up anything close to that before.”

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the nation’s steepest economic downturn since the Great Depression has also struck the rich. One indicator has been the number of private planes repossessed from owners who can no longer pay the notes or who are buried under liens stemming from unpaid maintenance and fuel bills.

“The small, single-engine Cessnas and Pipers are being repossessed all the way on up to 747s,” says Terence Haglund, founder of the Aviation Law Center in Williamsburg, Va., who represents many lenders. “It’s definitely recession-related, and it’s been increasing for the last couple of years.”

He doesn’t see the repossessions dipping significantly any time soon. “I think it’ll continue,” he says. “It has not slowed down yet.”

The beleaguered owners include businesses that have acquired corporate jets, affluent professionals who may choose to cruise the skies in small Pipers, and the fabulously wealthy who once had their pick among all of the above.

“A lot of what we’re seeing is … their aircraft are no longer worth what they were when they paid for them (and), they can no longer afford to operate and maintain them,” Haglund says. Some owners, he says, also get into trouble when they lease their planes to charter companies that then fail to pay what they owe for fuel, airport access and other services. That leads to liens on the aircraft.