After 550 years in the business, Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar has seen gold’s highs (and lows)

It’s not just on the financial markets where people are looking to protect their wealth. In Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar, traders have been buying and selling gold since 1461, the early days of the Ottoman Empire. Its shops attract between 250,000 and half a million visitors daily. One Moroccan tourist on a visit to the market told euronews (check video after the jump) the quality of gold varies from one store to another, but the prices are usually good. “Nevertheless, I always negotiate,” he said. An estimated 22 billion euros worth of gold is traded at the Grand Bazaar each year. (Image by Faraways / Shutterstock.com is of an unidentified salesman lining op bracelets at the Grand Bazaar on June 9, 2011 in Istanbul.)

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Green jobs may be replacing aluminum with ‘urban mining’

An electronics recycling company in Badin, Washington was talking Saturday to applicants for jobs at a facility that could employ as many as 200 people. A building that once was part of Alcoa's aluminum smelting operation is being upgraded to house an outpost of Electronic Recyclers International, said company president John Shegerian. "We use manual labor to take the screens out of the machines, and then start segregating the material," Shegerian said. "Then the carcasses all go into the shredding machine." He said the materials are then sold to manufacturers, which use the plastic, aluminum and copper to make new products. The only thing left to dispose of is a little dust. It's a process Shegerian calls "urban mining."

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Oilsands Quest rockets after Saskatchewan approves first oil sands leases

Oilsands Quest stock was trading up more than 60% at the close on Friday on more than 10-times usual volumes after the company announced it has received approval from the Government of Saskatchewan to convert portions of permits for its flagship project at Axe Lake to 15-year leases, the first oil sands leases in Saskatchewan. The stock was clobbered earlier this week after the company said it will ask for more cash from investors because its almost one-year long global quest to find a heavyweight partner had come up empty handed.

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Employment agencies offer training to meet skills shortage in Australia

Industries suffering from skills shortages in Australia (mining and minerals processing, utilities, communications, construction, manufacturing, tourism and hospitality) are being supported by employment agencies, moving to offer the training required to close the gap, reports The Gympie Times.

The current skill shortages are due to a persistent decline in the apprenticeship training rate and a sustained high level of output for most of the last decade across the industries that employ a high proportion of tradespeople, says Dr Phil Toner, senior researcher for the Australian Expert Group in Industry Studies. Dr Towner said the reduced training rate was caused by changes in the economy over the past two decades, including changes in demographics, school retention rates, privatisation and corporatisation of public utilities, and outsourcing. With state and federal funding, agencies like Employment Services Queensland are upskilling the unemployed to reverse this trend.

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Bernanke and Paul square off on gold

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) squared off, probably for the last time, at a congressional hearing on Wednesday on whether gold can be considered money. Paul, who belongs to the libertarian wing of the Republican party and is currently running for the the Republican presidential nomination, expressed his sentiments about gold and the Federal Reserve in the books End The Fed and the Case for Gold.

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Bear Creek bounces after taking legal action against Peru

Shares in Canada’s Bear Creek Mining Corporation bounced by over 4% at the open on Wednesday after the company announced it was launching legal action against the Peruvian government to regain its license for a mining concession in the south of the country. Peru cancelled Bear Creek’s licence in late June after protests against the Santa Ana Silver project resulted in five people being killed by police at an international airport 160km away from the site. Bear Creek’s injunction comes weeks ahead of the swearing in of the South American nation’s new leftwing president Ollanta Humala (pictured).

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