-- Posted Sunday, 3 January 2010 | | Source: GoldSeek.com
Our friends at GATA have had enough of the Fed's, and other Central Banks' alleged (and with so much circumstantial evidence presented both at Zero Hedge and elsewhere, that in this case "alleged" is just a term only a lawyer could love) manipulation of gold prices, and have taken Bernanke's monetization, manipulation and money making unlimited liability company to task ("M4 ULLC"). We are overjoyed that yet another entity has followed in the footsteps of our dear late friend Mark Pittman in taking on the one organization that represents all that is irreconcilably broken with the current economic and financial system. We wish GATA much success, and hope that ever more wronged counterparties will seek remedies from the Fed's consistent and blatant wealth transfer from America's Middle Class to the uber-wealthy, Wall Street-originating oligarchy.
GATA notes:
GATA today brought suit against the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, seeking a court order for disclosure of the central bank's records of its surreptitious market intervention to suppress the monetary metal's price.
The suit was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and targets Fed records involving gold swaps, exchanges of gold with foreign financial institutions. In a letter dated September 17 this year to GATA's law firm, William J. Olson P.C. of Vienna, Virginia, (http://www.lawandfreedom.com) Fed Board of Governors member Kevin M. Warsh acknowledged that the Fed has gold swap agreements with foreign banks but insisted that such documents remain secret:
http://www.gata.org/files/GATAFedResponse-09-17-2009.pdf
The lawsuit follows two years of GATA's efforts to obtain from the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury Department a candid accounting of the U.S. government's involvement in the gold market. These efforts parallel those of U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, who long has been proposing legislation to audit the Fed. The Fed has wrapped in secrecy much of its massive intervention in the markets over the last year, and Paul's legislation recently was approved by the U.S. House of Representatives.
The Fed claims that its gold swap records involve "trade secrets" exempt from disclosure under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.
While GATA has produced many U.S. government records showing both open and surreptitious intervention in the gold market in recent decades (see http://www.gata.org/node/8052), Fed Governor Warsh's letter is confirmation that the government is surreptitiously operating in the gold market in the present as well. That intervention constitutes a huge deception of financial markets as well as expropriation of precious metals miners and investors particularly. This deception and expropriation are what GATA was established in 1999 to expose and oppose.
Of course GATA's lawsuit against the Fed will take months if not years to resolve. We think we have a good chance of winning it in court. But we can win it outside court, and much sooner, if the suit can gain enough publicity from the financial news media and market analysts and prompt enough inquiry from them and from the public, the mining industry, and members of Congress.
So GATA urges its friends to publicize the suit and to urge journalists, market analysts, mining companies, and members of Congress to join us in seeking disclosure of the Fed's gold market intervention records. If enough clamor is directed at the Fed about these records, the gold price suppression scheme will lose its surreptitiousness and fail.
Zero Hedge has published enough declassified documents highlighting the Fed's desire to maintain unlimited control over the Gold market (and also here), that we are certain GATA has sufficient cause and in a just court of law system will see a ruling in its favor, especially since all GATA demands is opennness and transparency- a key mission of none other than President Barack Obama, who not that long ago issued the following directive:
The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails..... [i]n responding to requests under the FOIA, executive branch agencies ... should act promptly and in a spirit of cooperation, recognizing that such agencies are servants of the public. All agencies should adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open Government. The presumption of disclosure should be applied to all decisions involving FOIA.
Then again, with Obama himself beholden to both the Operating and Holding company of the Federal Reserve (we use metaphors sparingly but wisely), we are fairly certain that one simple phone call could abort the fair and equitable judicial process early on: after all even, gasp, Goldman bonuses could be at stake here. Which is why we urge readers to contact their Congressmen and Senators and demand that the same kind of transparency which is applicable to all, should most certainly pertain to the one private institution whose daily actions doom America to a fate far worse than mere sovereign default.
Tyler Durden, http://www.zerohedge.com
-- Posted Sunday, 3 January 2010 | Digg This Article | Source: GoldSeek.com