That's Ireland's per capita safety net if the euro goes belly-up. €46 per man, woman and child.

Let me explain. Ireland holds a mere 6 metric tonnes of gold. (This is an improvement on only a few years ago, when our gold holdings were a tiny 2 metric tonnes.)

Six metric tonnes translates into 192904.478 troy ounces. That amounts to around 0.0433 troy ounces per person in Ireland. At the current price of €1061 or so per ounce, that's a mere €46 of insurance each if the single currency goes boom.

Why does this matter? Because gold is real money. The euro is simply currency - fiat currency, created by the EU in an ill-fated attempt to challenge the post-Bretton Woods hegemony of the dollar as the world's reserve currency.

And why is that important? Because increasingly, fiat currencies are collapsing. The dollar is engaged in an almighty printing press operation designed to destroy America's overseas debt even as it erodes American citizens' personal wealth. The euro, due to the ongoing debt crisis in Ireland, Greece, Portugal and other member states, will inevitably follow.

The markets are well aware of all of this, and have been fleeing to safe havens for months now, such as the Swiss Franc and the Brazilian Real, both of which are so overvalued as to be harming their indigenous economies. But money has also been flowing into commodities. In a world where money is potentially infinite, only finite commodities can store value meaningfully.

Hence the upswing in oil, gold and silver prices.

Weimar Germany is the most memorable example of what happens when a currency ceases to be a meaningful store of wealth. But we've also seen it recently in Zimbabwe too, where hundred million Zim dollar notes became the norm.

In the current economic climate, all currencies are in a race to the bottom, as governments seek to devalue in order to restore competitiveness. At such a time, hedging wealth in real money - gold, oil, land, commodities, precious metals - becomes inevitably more popular, driving up the price.

Of those commodities, gold is the most important, because it has held the role of real money among humanity for over 5,000 years. You can't print more of it. It is non-inflationary. That's why all central banks hold it - as a hedge against currency fluctuation and hyperinflation.

To a lesser extent, silver, the former 'people's money' fulfils a similar role, or did until the last century when stringent efforts managed to remove most of the planet from a bimetal or gold standard and onto a fiat currency system that is now unravelling.

What does this mean for the average person? Well, there are only around 4.5 billion ounces of gold in the world, and more than 6.5 billion people. Gold has shot up in value in recent years, as the world economy began to fall apart. But this is not a bubble so much as the beginning of its rally.

What will happen if the world currencies continue to devalue at the current rate? More and more people will seek to hedge their wealth in the only non-eroding, infinitely divisible store of wealth there is - gold. And there's less than 3/4 of an ounce per person to go around.

Don't expect the government to be in any position to help you at that point, if paper becomes almost worthless and gold takes off for the stratosphere. Because, as we now know, they only hold 1/25th of an ounce for every person in the country. You're going to have to look after yourself on this one.

An even more interesting role is held by silver. Historically the money of currency (being of a lesser value than gold by an historical ratio of c. 15:1), silver has been undervalued for many years, partly due to price suppression by big banks like JP Morgan.

But silver is also in huge demand industrially, and there is even less of it available for personal investors than there is of gold. If paper begins to collapse as a viable means of exchange, we will see what is already happening in Zimbabwe - people reverting to precious metals as currency.

And in that context, the value of silver, currently nearly 50 times cheaper than gold, will rise even more quickly than the yellow metal. It will become again the means of exchange, as gold itself will be so valuable as to be unusable for small transactions.

For such reasons, I think it is wise for people to consider holding some gold and silver. Note, I don't say invest in gold or silver funds, such as GLD or SLV on the market. Those funds simply don't have the metal. They are fractionally leveraged in the same way banks are.

IE they hold only a fraction of what they trade (believed to be less than 1% currently). If you have such investments, I'd consider divesting them and seeking actual physical metal if I were you, as the price of physical metal and 'paper' metal already appears to be decoupling.

There are bullion accounts out there, where your money is stored as gold and silver in your name, thereby saving you the anxiety of stashing metal around your home. A quick google will throw them up if that interests you. I have an account with one for peace of mind.

Because if the euro collapses, then your euro savings go with it, and you'll experience the same poverty that Germans in Weimar did if you don't have some gold or silver - real money when the paper goes poof.

After all, the government only has 1/25th of an ounce with your name on it.

No, AC/DC aren't fighting Metallica to the death, cool and all though that would be.

I'm talking about the real world war being conducted today. The war that actually matters to us in Ireland, as opposed to the US colonisations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Heavy Metal War isn't being fought with bullets. That's not how the big wars take place anymore. It's being fought on the financial markets, by bankers and speculators and governments.

China, as we all know, has America by the scrota due to its ongoing huge trade surplus and its massive stockpile of greenbacks. Realising that the US, from municipalities, through states all the way up to the Fed, is actually bust, China is now trying to get out of the dollar before America takes them down too.

So they've been buying up Africa, and Australian commodities. Then they decided to stop exporting rare earths. These are obscure elements that are used in modern technology, from laptops to mobile phones. We need them for our toys. China's stopped sending them to us.

But even though China is in one mother of a property bubble, they still have infrastructure to build. They need things like concrete and copper. Oddly enough, one US banker (JP Morgan Chase) just cornered the copper market the other day. They now own half of all the copper on Earth, or 80%+ of the copper traded on the London metals exchange.

So we have a metals war between the US and China, playing out via the markets with banksters as the frontline generals.

It's not the only metal war, though. As the US prints its way out of economic trouble, the logical thing would be for the dollar to collapse into inflation. But that's not entirely happening right now. Why? Because as well as hedging their currency globally (by virtue of its position as the de facto world currency), America has also seen fit to suppress the value of real money, gold and silver.

Keeping the price of gold and silver down effectively keeps the price of the dollar and Dow Jones up.

JP Morgan admitted they were 'shorting' this market recently, after an investigation by regulators. This is the second front of the metals war. JPM have been fighting the price of precious metals down to prop up the dollar at the Fed's request.

Problem is, every time they smack the metals down, buyers pop up in China and India and snaffle up the real money for a bargain. And round and round the liabilities keep going, until sooner or later a stress fracture appears that cannot be papered over by permaprinting greenbacks.

This shit is likely boring the hole off you, so I'll stop there. Let's take a breath. What the fuck has any of this crap got to do with Ireland, you may be asking, if you're still awake?

Well, this is how things get done today. No more marching into the trenches to decide global disputes. Instead, you employ weapons of economic mass destruction and occupy nations via the markets.

That's what has happened in Ireland. Our sovereignty is one of the first casualties in the current world war. Bankers have run up debts, transferred them to our state and then foreclosed on us. Now we are mortgaged to international bankers to the tune of €170,000 each that we never borrowed. That's the size of a house loan. Each. One for every man, woman and child living here.

We can't pay it back. The idea isn't that we pay it back. The idea is that we service the loan for generations, as Germany did with the Versailles payments for WW1, which were only finally paid off the other month.

And while we're paying, our economy remains theirs to do with as they wish. And we remain indebentured debt slaves of the international bankers.

That's why you should care about the Heavy Metals War. Ireland was just a skirmish, a fundraising episode for bankers on the way to taking on China. But China just might be too big a target for them to take down.

For us in Ireland, until we're Back in Black, Nothing Else Matters. (Sorry!) But we don't have to accept our servitude without protest. Iceland conducted an effective guerilla economic war against their banker occupiers and succeeded. We could too.

By reneging on the bank guarantee, we would free ourselves of a hundred billion worth of debts that aren't rightfully ours. However, our politicians do not have the back bone or the sense of responsibility to their citizens that the Icelandic ones do.

But sometimes even the individual citizen can take guerrilla tactics to an occupying power. And this is something you can do too, in this economic war.

JP Morgan Chase are very short on silver. This means they've bet the price will remain low (thereby keeping it low) in order to keep the dollar high. So what can you do? Buy silver.

When you buy silver, you exchange paper money for real money. You make it that little bit harder for the banksters to keep the price low and the dollar high. You bring the banksters who took Ireland out that little bit closer to the precipice themselves. And you do yourself a favour too, by storing your hard-earned labour in real value, real money.

Crash JP Morgan, Buy Silver and let's save Ireland from the banksters.