-- Posted Wednesday, 25 March 2009 | Digg This Article
| Source: GoldSeek.com
Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
The long MarketWatch story published today about the decline in central bank gold sales may be most notable for coming upon without recognizing it and thus burying what appears to be more documentation of the central bank gold price suppression scheme. But, wonderfully, the story also quotes CPM Group Managing Director Jeffrey Christian as getting annoyed with "gold conspiracy theorists" who "twist the truth."
The new documentation of the gold price suppression scheme comes in a report by the London precious metals consultancy VM Group. About that report the MarketWatch story says:
"From last August, when the global credit crunch hit the financial industry, bullion banks borrowed 'as much gold as was available and executed gold swaps to raise liquidity,' VM analysts led by Carl Firman pointed out in a yearly report released earlier this month. The activity had an 'immediate and very marked affect' on gold by holding prices back, even in the wake of strong retail demand for physical metal, Firman wrote in a report."
It's too bad that the MarketWatch reporter, Moming Zhou, lacked the curiosity to ask Firman, Christian, or anyone else why bullion banks might borrow "as much gold as was available" -- presumably from central banks -- and then "execute gold swaps to raise liquidity" precisely when government currencies were losing confidence. But despite the euphemism of "raising liquidity," isn't the answer clear enough -- so that the central banks might crush gold as a competitive currency?
Maybe if he is really so distressed about all that "twisting of the truth" by "gold conspiracy theorists" Christian should volunteer for the debate on gold price suppression that Bloomberg TV program host Bernard Lo said tonight he is contemplating. In fairness, GATA would want Christian to be fully prepared for the evidence we present and discuss at such a debate, so we would send him, long in advance, among other things:
1) The minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee meeting of January 1995, which quote the Federal Reserve's general counsel, Virgil Mattingly, as acknowledging that the U.S. government has engaged in "gold swaps." The only purpose we can figure for "gold swaps" is market intervention, the more so insofar as Mattingly, when confronted with his comment years later, indignantly denied making it. But maybe Christian can offer some other explanation.
2) Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan's testimony to Congress in July 1998 acknowledging that central banks lease gold to suppress its price -- not to earn a little money on a supposedly dead asset, a canard repeated in the MarketWatch story below.
3) Barrick Gold's claim, made in U.S. District Court in New Orleans in February 2003, to share the sovereign immunity of central banks against lawsuit, insofar as Barrick was their agent in shorting gold to help control its price.
4) The annual report of the Reserve Bank of Australia for 2003, which asserted that central banks hold gold for intervention in the currency markets.
5) The speech given in June 2005 to a conference at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, by the head of the bank's monetary and economic department, William S. White, who said that a major purpose of international central bank cooperation is "the provision of international credits and joint efforts to influence asset prices (especially gold and foreign exchange) in circumstances where this might be thought useful."
6) The memorandum recently discovered in the archive of former Fed Chairman William McChesney Martin detailing a scheme for the U.S. government to rig the currency and gold markets surreptitiously and to obfuscate, falsify, or withdraw government publications so the scheme would not be discovered.
If Christian can dispose of all this convincingly, there's plenty more. As GATA Chairman Bill Murphy said on Bloomberg TV tonight, we don't want to talk about "conspiracy theory," just the facts on the public record. We'll leave conspiracy theory to Christian.
The MarketWatch story is available here: http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/Central-banks-sell-less-gold/story.aspx?guid={0573231B-37D7-4328-A126-76FED1FC90B2}
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
-- Posted Wednesday, 25 March 2009 | Digg This Article | Source: GoldSeek.com
