Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

For some years now people in GATA crowd have remarked to each other that gold market manipulation by central banks and their bullion bank agents couldn't get more obvious -- only to be proved wrong the next day.

Unnerving as this can be, at least lately we have had the consolation that more people are catching on. Over the last year manipulation of most markets has been almost taken for granted, and manipulation of the gold and silver markets now is being discussed in places that recently were dismissing such complaints with ridicule or even contempt.

Most notable in this regard is Friday's commentary in the Financial Times about the fraud of "paper gold":

http://www.gata.org/node/13562

Your secretary/treasurer long has been bringing documentation of monetary metals market manipulation --

http://www.gata.org/taxonomy/term/21

-- to the attention of FT journalists and those at other major financial news organizations, achieving little success, and your secretary/treasurer has no idea how this particular FT writer came to the gold fraud issue, since he is not among the journalists GATA has been hectoring. So maybe that's a good sign too. As GATA board member Ed Steer observes, that FT writer isn't the only financial journalist who knows the score about the gold market; everyone at the FT knows now. That particular journalist is just the only one at a major financial news organization who has managed to tell about it. And now that the issue has exploded in the FT, surely many financial journalists who have not known about gold market manipulation know something.

So exactly how does GATA stand with its issue now?

It has been a long time since our premise has been seriously disputed. Yes, there are the occasional sneers from Doug Casey of Casey Research, Jeff Christian of the metals consultancy CPM Group, and bloggers like Mish Shedlock, but, as the old philosopher asked rhetorically, "Who can refute a sneer?" Those guys never address the evidence; they offer only their ideologies or claims to omniscience.

It would be wonderful if they engaged with the documents, arguing that the documents have been misconstrued or even that they are forgeries. It would be more wonderful still if those guys tried putting a specific and inconvenient critical question to a central bank about its activity in the gold market, as GATA often has done.

For example, is the Bank for International Settlements really not intervening in the gold market every day on behalf of its central bank members and really not even offering to arrange secret gold market interventions for them?:

http://www.gata.org/node/12717

http://www.gata.org/node/11012

Is the Banque de France really not trading gold for its own account "nearly on a daily basis"?:

http://www.gata.org/node/13373

Is the International Monetary Fund really not concealing the gold swaps and leases of its members to facilitate their surreptitious interventions in the gold and currency markets?:

http://www.gata.org/node/12016

Is the Federal Reserve really not concealing most of its gold records?:

http://www.gata.org/node/9917

But persuading Casey, Christian, Shedlock, and those who can only sneer is not GATA's objective; satisfying as persuading them might be, it would accomplish little for the liberation of the gold market.

Along with financial news organizations, GATA's more prospective targets are 1) governments and central banks that might aspire to some sovereignty over their own economic affairs; 2) the gold and silver mining industry, which has yet to mobilize to defend itself; and, of course, 3) ordinary investors.

The industry may be the toughest target, as it seems to consider itself almost as omniscient as Casey, Christian, and Shedlock consider themselves.

For example, two months ago your secretary/treasurer sent a letter by international express mail to the chief executive officer of Goldcorp, which may be the biggest gold mining company in the world by market capitalization, asking if a GATA delegation might visit his office in Vancouver to make a brief presentation while the delegation was attending the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference. The letter included a copy of one of the incriminating IMF documents cited above and invited an easy response by e-mail. But predictably enough there was no acknowledgment at all. Apparently even "No, thanks" typed by a secretary into an e-mail window required more courtesy than Goldcorp's CEO could spare. Even a "Go screw yourself" would have been more courteous and welcome.

Such conduct may win points for Goldcorp from its bankers, like JPMorganChase and HSBC --

http://goldcorp.com/default.aspx?SectionId=10c11b86-a3a4-41d5-a716-0796f...

-- key players in the monetary metals price suppression scheme, but maybe not so many points from the company's shareholders, who may wonder about the company's fiduciary duty to them.

But GATA presses on and as we do it may be good not to get bogged down in details here and there. Whether the gold of Germany's Bundesbank really remains at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Banque de France is an exciting question, and the inability of those central banks to account convincingly for the gold is indeed evidence that at least one of them has done something for which it doesn't want to account. But that's largely speculation, and while speculation can be fun and sometimes useful, we don't need it when we have the documentation.

For what we have here is not what those who merely sneer call "conspiracy theory"; it is ordinary research, fact finding. Applied to gold this remains, unfortunately, even rarer than the metal itself.

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.

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 -- Published: Monday, 27 January 2014 | E-Mail  | Print  | Source: GoldSeek.com

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