Gold Closing Price: $1,412.00 (+$9.90)

Silver Closing Price: $22.68 (+$0.16)

Gold hit a high today of $1,423.22, and silver hit a high of $22.887 in the early afternoon, EST. The USD fell again today, and gold and silver rose slightly higher than yesterday. U.S. jobless claims decreased by 11,000 to 346,000.

The European Central Bank (ECB) had a meeting today and said that they would not change their interest rates from the current 0.5 percent. Mario Draghi, the ECB's President said that the European Union's growth should stabilize and increase toward the end of this year. With interest rates so low, one wonders whether the growth is just nominal (equal to inflation) rather than real growth.

Gold Closing Price: $1,402.10 (+$3.90)

Silver Closing Price: $22.52 (-$0.02)

Gold and silver prices increased during Asian trading hours, but fell back down by the time the US Market closed. Gold and silver remain almost unchanged from the day before.

U.S. stocks and U.S. dollar index fell today from worse than expected jobs data was released today. 135,000 jobs were added in May, much less than the expected 157,000. Between January and April, an average of 196,000 jobs a month were created by employers.

The question we must all ponder now, will the Federal Reserve stop quantitative easing as they said they would, or delay this based on lower than expected job data?

Fractional silver is silver that has a weight value less than one ounce. This type of silver is important to own in your silver portfolio. For one, fractional silver diversifies your silver holdings. If you think of gold and silver as money, you would want different denominations of them. if you ever plan on using silver as money or barter in the future, then it is essential that you own fractional silver. Of course fractional silver does have a higher price. The main reason for this is economies of scale. Think of buying a can of Coca Cola at a convenient store vs. buying a two liter bottle at a bulk food store such as Sam's Club or Costco. So you do not want to hold all your silver as fractional, but it is good to have at least some fractional silver.

We sell a large variety of fractional silver from one gram to half ounce silver rounds and coins. Another great benefit of fractional silver is education. One tenth ounce of silver costs much less than one ounce of silver. If you want to show people the value of sound money, or hard assets, as opposed to paper, then you can do so much more effectively and far reaching by showing them, or giving them, a gram of silver than an ounce of silver. We like to carry some silver in our pockets, and whenever we can, take it out to show people and talk about the benefits of alternative competing currencies, sound money, and financial responsibility.

One of the unique products we offer, and at the lowest prices, are one gram silver rounds or bars of your own design. You can have a one gram silver bar or silver round with any design of your choosing on both the obverse (front) and reverse (back) of the silver. It's great for marketing or promoting yourself, an idea, or a company! You can have them made for a wedding, as a business card, baby showers, speaking events, business trade shows, just to name a few. There is a lot of potential for the one gram custom designs.

To stamp an image onto a silver round or bar, we need to make what is called a die. The die is made of steel and has the image engraved onto it. It is pressed into the silver to create the round or bar with the image on it. It takes between 15-25 days after you send us the images that you want on the silver to create the die, stamp the silver and ship them out to you!

To find out more about our custom 1 gram silver products, please click here for the product listings.

Do Americans value gold and silver? Do they know what inflation or the Federal Reserve is? Have they ever heard of Ben Bernanke? We're not sure, but we want your help to find out!

Amagi Metals is launching our “What Do Americans Know About Money” Video Contest. The winner will receive five (5) ounces of silver from silver coins, rounds, or bars of their choice. For those of you who don't know, that's about $125 in silver at today's price.

To enter, all you have to do is create a minimum one minute long video answering the question What Do Americans Know About Money? Participants have a month to enter into the video contest. The winning video will be based on creativity and how well the message is conveyed.

Steps:

1. Create awesome video.
2. Upload the video on or before June 30^th to YouTube with The Title “What Do Americans Know About Money,” and be sure to enter in the description that this is a video contest for Amagi Metals at www.amagimetals.com. Email the URL of the video to video@amagimetals.com, or post it in the comments below!
3. On July 5^th tune in to our YouTube channel where we will announce the winner of the video contest!

Rules

• The video must be produced with original content.
• The video must be a minimum of 1 minute and must contain audio and video.
• Please do not harm baby seals, alpacas, or any other animals for the creation of your videos.
• 

We are very excited about having a table at the 2013 Colorado Coin Show! We will be selling gold and silver coins, rounds, bar, and other bullion.

When?

June 28th - 30th, 9am - 5pm

Where?

Freedom Financial Expo Center
3650 N. Nevada Avenue
Colorado Springs, CO 80907

We will also be accepting bitcoins for gold and silver at our table! In addition to precious metals dealers, there are also going to be a lot of great exhibits, including:

• Buffalo Nickels, 100th Year Anniversary, 1913-2013
• Celebrating the Denver Mint
• Discovering Colorado through Elongated Cents
• Elongated Cents
• A Collection of National Commemorative Medals issued for The Pony Express Centennial
• Small Denominations of the Civil War Era
• Things You Didn't Know Existed

The coin show is free, so stop by and visit your favorite precious metals dealer!

We are pleased to announce the latest addition to our silver coin offerings, the Vienna (Austrian) Philharmonic.

Although the Vienna Philharmonic coins were first released in 2008, they come from one of the oldest mints in the world, the Austrian Mint, which dates back to 1192.

The artwork on these coins is that of Thomas Pesendorfer. Each Silver Vienna Philharmonic coin features imagery of the cultural pride of Austria, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. The obverse side of the coin is stamped with the name of the orchestra and the word "silver" in German, and features a montage of instruments, including a string bass, cellos, violins, a bassoon, harp and Viennese horn, representing Austria's rich musical and cultural heritage. The reverse side of the coin features the image of the "Great Organ" found in the "Golden Hall", the concert hall where the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra performs. Of interest, the Golden Hall was not built to the accepted acoustic standards known today and is long, narrow and tall. It measures approximately forty-eight meters long, nineteen meters wide, and eighteen meters high but still seats over 1,700 people with room for another 300 standing individuals. The country of issue, the silver weight in ounces, and the 1.5 euro legal tender value are also stamped on the reverse side of the coin.

You can buy them here: http://www.amagimetals.com/1-oz-2013-austrian-silver-philharmonic-coin-vienna-philharmonic.html

For Immediate Release

Amagi Metals Turns Bitcoins Into Gold

Denver, Colorado

May 15, 2013

If you have money tied up in bitcoins, the virtual currency that is creating so much buzz among the technocracy, and would like to convert it into something more tangible, Stephen Macaskill has a solution. Macaskill’s company, Amagi Metals, is a precious metals dealer that accepts bitcoins for the purchase of gold, silver, and base metals such as copper, titanium, and zinc.

Some people regard bitcoins as a speculative commodity similar to gold or oil or wheat futures, and to a certain extent, they are. But there are differences, too, and those differences make the cyber-currency attractive to a wide variety of individuals and businesses. Amagi Metals is one of the companies that see enough upside in bitcoin trading to accept them as payment for their goods.

“We feel that the concept of Bitcoins and the technology behind it make it a viable currency. However, we do not feel that Bitcoins offer more long-term security than government-backed currencies like the dollar or the Euro; Bitcoin is a short-term solution to issues with governmentbacked currencies, and the fluctuations in Bitcoin prices represents significant opportunity for speculative investors.” says Amagi Metals owner Stephen Macaskill. “That’s why we’re allowing customers to use Bitcoins to purchase gold and silver from us.”

Their willingness to accept bitcoins for buying precious metals has made Amagi Metals the world’s largest bitcoin retailer with over $800,000 in transactions in April 2013 alone.

The value of a bitcoin fluctuates in much the same way as commodities or stocks do. There are bitcoin exchanges that track transactions and quote bitcoin values in US dollars or Euros or about any other currency. Amagi Metals tracks those values along with the market price of metals and are thus able to quote the price of gold, for instance, in bitcoins.

A buyer goes through the typical online checkout process and when it comes time to select the form of payment, rather than choosing a conventional one like a credit card, they select “bitcoin” and are quoted the number of bitcoins needed for payment based on the current market value of the “virtual currency.” As with entering a credit card payment, the buyer’s bitcoin account information is entered (bitcoins are kept in a “bitcoin wallet” with codes similar to a credit card account number), and then the payment is made by transferring the bitcoins from the buyer’s “wallet” to the seller’s.

Because bitcoin transactions are difficult (some would say impossible) to trace, they have become attractive to persons engaged in illegal transactions, raising concerns about the ethics of using bitcoins. Macaskill is aware of the concerns and has controls at Amagi Metals to address them.

“Because we’re in the precious metals business, we have always been careful about who we sell to,” he says. “There are regulations in our industry to prevent illegal commerce, and we apply those to all our purchases, whether they’re in bitcoins or dollars. Ultimately it comes down to knowing your customer, and we go to great lengths to assure that all of our transactions are on the up-and-up.”

Ultimately, whether a business trades in bitcoins or not is based on their belief in them as a viable currency. If they choose to trade in bitcoins, there are other benefits in accepting them such as minimal transaction costs and instant access to funds that make them more attractive than traditional money transfers.

Amagi Metals and Stephen Macaskill are believers and plan to maintain their position as a major player in the bitcoin economy.

We are pleased to announce that we are now accepting Dwolla payments for precious metals!

Dwolla is a payment network that allows anyone to send, request, or accept money. Why does Dwolla rock? It only costs $0.25 per transaction! Yes, that's right, instead of paying hefty credit card or PayPal processing fees on checkout, you can Pay via DWOLLA and the only fee is $0.25 per transaction. When you checkout and use Dwolla as your payment method, you are essentially paying at Amagi Metals cash price for gold and silver bullion.

When every penny counts, saving 2.5% by using Dwolla rather than PayPal or credit cards makes a lot of sense to people who want to keep more money in their pockets. You can visit the company at www.dwolla.com.

We need your help!

Amagi Metals is developing a resource section called "Inflation Station," dedicated to educating people around the world about inflation. Many of you know that inflation is an expansion of the money supply, which is caused by the meddling of central banking. We want to create a resources readily accessible and easy for anyone to understand and accumulate more knowledge if they so desire: http://www.amagimetals.com/inflation

As you can see, the page is pretty darn sparse. We have been very busy over the last month, acquiring, providing, and shipping our customers their gold and silver. So we thought we would call upon you, our amazing customers and metal aficionados, to help us develop our "Inflation Station" through crowd sourcing. By helping us you get to be a part of improving the education of financial responsibility and sound money around the world. In addition to that good feeling deep down inside, you also enter into our silver giveaway where you can win two ounces of silver! The silver will be two 1 ounce Freedom Girl rounds, or two ounces of silver of equal value.

All you have to do is send us at least one educational resource regarding inflation. It can be an infographic, video, book resources, articles, essay, podcast, academic journals, sourced statistics.

To submit the inflation information and enter in the silver giveaway, please post in the comments section or send us an email at inflation@amagimetals.com with the education resource and your name by next Thursday, May 30th.

On Friday, May 31st, at 1pm MST, we will put all the names in a hat, and film the drawing of the winner and upload it to our YouTube page. Good luck, and we look forward to your submissions!

In our experience, shipments are lost less than 0.3% of the time. We take many measures to reduce the loss of shipments. In recent months we have been receiving a large number of questions about our shipping and insurance policies, so we thought we would address them.

This is our basic insurance policy:

All shipments are insured.

That's right, we insure all parcels one way or another. We ship via a wide variety of shipping carriers: USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL, and for the larger orders, companies like Brink. For orders under $100, we self insure. If you place an order for, say $50, and it is lost in the mail, we will either replace it, or send you a full refund, and we take the loss. You may or may not have to fill out an affidavit saying that you placed an order and it was never received.

Many shipping carriers, such as USPS, FedEx, and UPS have their own insurance programs. We do not insure through the shipping carriers for a variety of reasons. As an example, USPS puts a label on the outside of the package showing that the shipment is insured. That's an immediate red flag indicating that the parcel has valuable contents in it. We don't like to advertise the value of the parcels that we ship any more than we have to. Many of the other carriers will not insure gold and silver bullion.

We use an external insurance company, instead of the shipping carriers insurance program, for orders over $100. They insure domestic shipments up to $150,000 per package, and international shipments up to $30,000 per package. If you are an international customer and order $90,000 in gold, then we would ship it in three separate packages so that they are all insured. If, in the unfortunate event, your shipment is lost, damaged, or stolen, we will need your help to secure the insurance claim to make you whole. This means that you will have to fill out an affidavit, and you may have to talk to the police and/or insurance company. You only have to do that in the event that the shipment is lost in transit, which is very unlikely to happen in the first place.

We also take additional measures to secure and protect your parcels while they are on their journey to you. We do not put or use the words Amagi Metals, metals, gold, silver, or bullion anywhere on or outside the parcel, including the return address. In addition, we package the gold and silver bullion inside boxes or bubble mailers inside other boxes or bubble mailers. In some cases we put a box within a box within a box. That way if the box or package breaks or opens, the shipping carrier will just find another box or package.

To us, shipping is an art. Every shipment is unique and has its own needs and requirements. We tailor the package to meet the needs of the short or long journey to you, the metal aficionado, and our wonderful customers.