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No, this post is unfortunately not whether or not the Italians invented noodles or if they borrowed the recipe from Marco Polo.

I am still on vacation and had a chance to watch CCTV 9 last night, the segment was Biz China. I was surprised that they had a 10 minute segment on gold. They interviewed a bunch of stock investors, bankers and authors — all of whom had very positive things to say about gold. And at the very end, they briefly plugged Peter Schiff’s book “Crash Proof.” Ha!

I suppose this is not terribly surprising for a couple of reasons. First, apparently many academics and policy makers have bought and read “Currency Wars” from Song Hongbing (here is a review from The Australian). While I can’t endorse the book (in part because it pushes a conspiratorial angle of things and because it doesn’t encourage a free-floating Yuan), I suppose it’s a positive sign of the openness to new ideas.

The other reason is that economist Robert Mundell is an adviser to Chinese central bankers. And he at least appreciates the positive role gold can play in stabilizing a financial system and supposedly even encouraged China to buy all of the IMFs gold at one point. Last year he was chosen as one of the “top 15 most important foreigners in the past 30 years” by a Chinese committee and has written extensively about gold in the past (including somewhat recently last June).

On a different note, be sure to also check out Robert Wenzel’s post about Schiff and Mish.

And lastly, if you’re ever out here on the mainland, be sure to check out the Harbin Ice Festival. One of my British friends just got back and the pictures are pretty bad ass.