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Several years ago, Walter Luhrman, a metallurgist in southern Ohio, discovered a copper deposit of tantalizing richness. North America's largest copper mine--a vast open-pit complex in Arizona--usually has to process a ton of ore in order to produce ten pounds of pure copper; Luhrman's mine, by contrast, yielded the same ten pounds from just thirty or forty pounds of ore. Luhrman operated profitably until mid-December, 2006, when the federal government shut him down.
The copper deposit that Luhrman worked wasn't in the ground; it was in the storage vaults of Federal Reserve banks, and, indirectly, in the piggy banks, coffee cans, automobile ashtrays, and ...