12:42p ET Friday, August 11, 2017

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

The Wall Street Journal's feeble attempt this week to acknowledge the issue of gold market rigging by the U.S. government at least landed on the newspaper's front page today. You can see its display at the lower left side of the page here:

http://www.gata.org/files/WallStreetJournalFrontPage-08-11-2017.jpg

The report signifies that the situation with gold has become crazy enough that it now can be discussed in polite company. The report also signifies that no one who wants to maintain respectability can yet pose the right specific questions to anyone in authority. Even former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, hero of limited government and sound money, always declined to pose the right specific questions to the right people despite his long membership on the House Financial Services Committee, during which he often got a few minutes to confront Federal Reserve and Treasury Department officials but much preferred to make speeches instead.

Note how artfully the Journal's report was written and edited. It's posted at GATA's internet site here:

http://www.gata.org/node/17562

Through comments by experts associated with GATA's work and views -- Bullion Star's Ronan Manly, Sprott Asset Management's John Embry, GoldMoney's James Turk, futures market analyst James McShirley, and Peter Boehringer, founder of the movement in Germany to repatriate that country's gold -- the report cites complaints and suspicion that the U.S. government is involved with other central banks in leasing and swapping gold to control the monetary metal's price.

As it pursued the issue, the Journal was given documentation of this by GATA, including:

-- Federal Reserve Board member Kevin M. Warsh's letter to GATA's lawyer in 2009 admitting the Fed's participation in gold swaps:

http://www.gata.org/node/7819

-- Warsh's own essay in the Journal in 2011 in which he asserted that "policy makers are finding it tempting to pursue 'financial repression' -- suppressing market prices that they don't like":

http://www.gata.org/node/10839

-- The secret March 1999 report of the staff of the International Monetary Fund confirming that central banks conceal their gold leasing and swapping to facilitate their surreptitious interventions in the currency markets:

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

-- And New York Federal Reserve Bank President William Dudley's videotaped refusal in March 2016 to answer in public a question about gold leasing and swapping by the Fed:

http://www.gata.org/node/16341

But having given voice to these complaints and suspicion, the Journal declined to question any Federal Reserve or Treasury Department official about them. This violated the most elementary principle of journalism -- to report all sides of a story, especially when someone in the story has been criticized or accused.

Of course the Fed and Treasury don't want to tell their side here, and in fairness to the Journal it must be acknowledged that just giving voice to complaints about central banking is politically incorrect in the extreme. Committing actual journalism against central banking would be treason to the elite that controls the powerful realm from which the Journal takes its very name.

After all, as was explained by the assistant to the prime minister in "Yes, Prime Minister," the BBC's brilliant comedy series of some years ago, "The only way to understand the press is to remember that they pander to their readers' prejudices":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGscoaUWW2M

Defective as it is, the Journal's report will reach a wide audience and spread suspicion. The report was linked for a few hours on the Drudge Report internet site.

But it may be a while before The Wall Street Journal thinks that its readers are ready to be told that the market economy the newspaper long has purported to defend has become a predatory illusion, and longer still before the newspaper is ready to admit that it knowingly has helped to sustain this illusion.

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
CPowell@GATA.org

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 -- Published: Sunday, 13 August 2017 | E-Mail  | Print  | Source: GoldSeek.com

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