The theme of titles of nobility is slightly removed from our normal topics of offshore bank accounts, precious metals and wealth creation… but going back over the years noble titles have been a recurring theme of interest to readers of our private newsletter.

There are, of course, many scams and fake orders of nobility. Richard Cawte and our constitutional lawyer the Duke de Ronceray have both been instrumental in exposing a number of ‘noble scams.’ The internet has made it much easier to keep track of scammers too, and to carry out the necessary due diligence on previously unknown noble orders.

Nobility, however, does have a lot to do with wealth. As regular readers are aware, wealth is not just about riches. Wealth is about being complete, and participating positively in our communities. And this is exactly the tradition of nobility that we wish to encourage and support.

With this in mind, I have a call today to readers of the blog. I would like to know if this is a theme that interests you? Here at Q Wealth we do have contact with some reliable, honest and genuine orders of nobility and we can make the necessary introductions. If there is a reasonable level of interest in this topic, we will be happy to put together an article for an upcoming edition of the Q Wealth Report, and perhaps to include a White Paper in the Members’ Area explaining more about the specific contacts we have.

If you are interested in ‘offshore’ nobility – that is, if you consider yourself a noble person and you seek social recognition of that fact – please feel free to contact myself, Peter Macfarlane initially via the Q Wealth communications office in London…

It’s interesting (even rewarding) to see that the mainstream media is beginning to say some of the things we have been telling our readers for years. For example, an article in The Daily Telegraph of London exclaims that,

Merrill Lynch has revealed that some of its richest clients are so alarmed by the state of the financial system and signs of political instability around the world that they are now insisting on the purchase of gold bars, shunning derivatives or “paper” proxies.

Gary Dugan, the chief investment officer for the US bank, is quoted in the Telegraph article as saying that clients are “genuinely worried about what the world is going to look like in 2009. It is amazing how many clients want physical gold, not ETFs. They are so worried they want a portable asset in their house. I never thought I would be getting calls from clients saying they want a box of krugerrands,” he said.

Merrill Lynch has predicted that gold will soon surpass its all time-high of $1,030 an ounce, reaching $1,150 by June.

If deflation sets in and rocks the economic system, gold will serve as a safe-haven, explains Telegraph journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. With the opposite scenario, if massive monetary stimulus sets off inflation, gold will also come into its own, as a store of value. “It’s win-win either way,” says Merrill’s Mr Dugan.

They further warned that the eurozone was likely to come under strain this year as slump deepens. “There is going to be friction as governments in the south start talking politically about coming out of the euro. I don’t see the tensions in Greece as a one-off. It is a sign of social strain in countries that have lost competitiveness.” This echoes what we have been saying for years… we would just add that the pound sterling (see my other article about the Bank of England’s new license to print money) and the US dollar look equally doomed.

Gold may be the only answer, and indeed should make up a substantial portion of any diversified investment portfolio. And I would again stress that you should be buying physical gold bullion, not exchange traded funds, gold certificates etc. Buying physical gold has actually become quite difficult of late, with long waiting lists and high premiums. But fear not – your intrepid Q Wealth Offshore Banking team are putting the final touches now to “The Gold Report” which will explain several exciting new strategies for bypassing the gold and banking cartel altogether, acquiring pure gold bullion at a reasonable price, which you then hold in a secure offshore safe deposit box to which only you or your chosen representatives hold the key. Watch this space for more details.

Additional note from the editor: While you are waiting for “The Gold Report” by Peter Macfarlane you might also enjoy our brand new five part intensive offshore course, covering topics like offshore banking, asset protection, estate planning and trusts by our very own Peter Macfarlane, plus excellent articles by Thomas Bolther and Richard Cawte with practical solutions for building wealth into the future. The question is “How do you achieve the lifestyle of complete freedom without having the first $1,000,000 in the bank?” The answers you will find in this new five part intensive course, appropriately named “Secrets of the Super Rich.” Oh and did I tell you the best thing about this course? It’s free! Sign up right now online over at QWealthReport.com

by Peter Macfarlane for The Q Wealth Report

I’ve written a lot about the difficulties these days in buying physical gold, and why I recommend buying real physical gold as opposed to paper certificates etc. Very soon we’ll be releasing here news of my “Gold Report” which will be available for download to Q Wealth members.

But today I want to tell you about something I noticed during the past year that very few people have commented on, but that lots of people I have talked to have noticed. They have noticed it but have not thought fully about the consequences. It is the opposite problem – people don’t want US dollars any more!

Have you tried to exchange US dollars for local currency in a foreign country recently? Or to deposit US cash in a foreign bank? Then you probably know what I’m talking about. Various petty restrictions. $50 or $100 bills with certain serial numbers are not accepted in many countries. In others if you want to spend a $50 or $100 bill a supervisor in the store has to approve it and record your passport number.

Today, for the first time in my life, I actually saw a money exchange business that simply won’t accept US dollars cash any more. This was in Cancun, Mexico. They were welcoming Canadian dollars, Euros, Swiss Francs etc… but saying “no thanks” to the greenback. I asked why, and they said they will still exchange USD for clients who are registered (ID, utility bills etc) but not for tourists. (So they didn’t exactly answer my question, but I think the cashier was one of those people who don’t always think about ‘why’)

So, tourists get sent to the bank around the corner. They will still exchange USD cash, but not more than $500 for non-clients.

The superficial reason for these restrictions is the paranoia surrounding money laundering and fake bills. Most Latin American countries have far more dollars coming in than flowing out (at least in cash) – some of this may be due to drug money, but the vast majority is completely legitimate money related to travel, tourism, remittances by emigrant workers and so on. So casas de cambio (money exchange houses) have to dispose of their excess dollar cash by somehow depositing it into the banking system, which has become nigh on impossible because of pressure from correspondent banks in the USA.

But the pendulum has certainly swung too far. If an American tourist in Cancun has to spend an hour in different lines and be limited to spending $500 per day, then surely this is no different from the pre-Thatcher era in the UK for example when exchange controls were in place? Other places with exchange controls today, like South Africa or Venezuela, also have official daily limits in place on spending by their nationals traveling overseas.

Yes, my friends, the USA has well and truly already succeeded in introducing exchange controls by the back door. The consequences of this, given the USD’s status as a global reserve currency, are simply incredible. It’s amazing that so few people have noticed or commented on this yet!

In case you are thinking this only applies to cash, remember there are ATM daily limits of various sorts (imposed by both card-issuing banks and by local ATM networks around the world such as in Brazil or Argentina) and banks from US, UK and elsewhere have a habit of just blocking accounts for “potential fraud” if anyone spends more than a few hundred dollars outside their home country. Then the cardholder has to make a lengthy international call pressing buttons, listening to music and finally convincing a bank officer that their card has not been compromised before he can start spending his own money again.

Yes, sure, there are ways around all this. Of course you can travel with 10 different ATM cards or you can acquire offshore debit cards and offshore credit cards with much higher daily limits, even in USD. You can buy foreign currency before you leave the US. You can use travelers checks. You can spend a day of your vacation visiting 10 different banks and exchanging a small amount in each. That is not the point. The point is that for the average good-citizen American tourist or business traveler, let’s say the man on the bus in Cancun, it is going to be difficult to spend more than a few hundred dollars a day of their own money overseas. That is why I say “exchange controls are already in place.”

Many of you will already have heard the rumors about the Amero, or about supposed plans to have different colored dollars for internal and external use. Personally, I don’t buy such rumors. They are conspiracy theories. There is a lot of merit in the ideas behind them, but if as the evidence above proves, for all practical purposes exchange controls are already in place, why would the Federal Reserve risk the political backlash of explicitly imposing exchange controls?

What will happen in 2009? How much worse can this get? And how can you protect yourself and your family from the global consequences of USD exchange controls – whether or not you are American? These are questions we answer in depth in each quarterly issue of The Q Wealth Report. If you are not yet a subscriber, you should be! We will show you how to build wealth and take advantage of real money-making opportunities presented by the drastic changes taking place in the global financial system. Subscribe today!

“OUR NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION IS TO HELP OUR READERS PROSPER DURING 2009″

New Year is always an exciting time, but understandably many of us are entering 2009 with great trepidation. The last year has been difficult for most of us, including in some unusual ways that we may not have predicted. 2009 will be worse… for most people. But for you, it can be a lot better. Please allow us a few moments to explain how…

At Q Wealth, our New Year’s Resolution is to help our readers not just survive the downturn, but to thrive and grow wealthy from it!

How are we going to live up to this goal?

• We will give you concrete, nuts and bolts strategies for preserving your wealth and protecting your assets. Ideas are useful, but sometimes they are hard to implement. We will give you specific tools. Just one example: we recommend gold as an excellent hedging and asset protection strategy, because it’s inflation proof, secure and non reportable. But we recommend buying real gold – paper gold such as certificates is no longer secure. Right now, we have nearly completed work on a totally new strategy to empower our readers to buy and hold physical gold. You will be able to keep it in a secure, insured offshore vault, in a tax friendly neutral country with direct flights from North America and Europe. YOU will be the only person in the world with the key to the safe deposit box where your gold is kept. No-one else will know it is there, and you will not be legally obliged to report it anywhere. A white paper about this will be released in the first couple of weeks of January and will be available for download free of charge to Q Wealth Members in the Members’ Section.

• We will give you concrete, nuts and bolts strategies for growing your wealth. Preserving wealth is great, but it’s not enough. We want you to get rich in 2009! We have a new Q Wealth Expert on the team, Thomas Bolther, whom some of you met in May 2008 at Recipes for Success in Cancun. Thomas has made millions in both real estate and online business. He will explain some of his unique success tips in the Q Wealth Report during 2009. To begin with, in a special report that will be available in the Members Section for free download by mid-January, he will tell us 10 Sure-Fire Ways to Travel First or Business Class at vastly reduced rates.

• We will give you direct access to reliable experts. These days, there’s no lack of information. The problem is sorting and analyzing it, and figuring out who you can trust. That is the work we do all day every day on behalf of our members, and we will be intensifying our efforts still further in 2009 as concerned citizens swell our subscriber base. We have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and flown many times around the world to find some of the few reliable experts who are not just honest, but share our freedom, wealth and privacy mindset.

2008 has certainly made people think. If you look back to what Richard Cawte and Peter Macfarlane predicted in 2007, at the time people thought we were nuts! In 2008 it happened. You might very well have learned some expensive lessons in 2008… don’t let one of them be failure to think about the future, see the big picture, and plan accordingly. If estate planning, asset protection or that new overseas lifestyle you’ve been dreaming of are things you have been putting off, why wait? The time is now.

Big changes are happening. Ride the crest of change and you won’t regret it. But information is only going to help you in so far as you act on it, so your friends here at Q Wealth are with you all the way!

P.S. If you don’t yet have access to the Members’ Section, don’t worry. It only takes five minutes. If you are an existing print subscriber, just email Dana Parkinson info@qwealthreport.com and Dana will set you up with login details. If you are not yet a Paid Member you can sign up online right now at http://www.qwealthreport.com/signup.php  There are online (credit card) and offline (cheque or money order) subscription options.

P.P.S. Interested in Offshore Banking? Our global banking, offshore companies and trust expert Peter Macfarlane has been busy over the holidays updating his definitive ‘Practical Offshore Banking Guide.’  The 2009 edition will be available free to members shortly.