Jeff Christian now just makes it up as he goes along

2:46p ET Saturday, October 22, 2011

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

Debating GATA Chairman Bill Murphy yesterday at the Silver Summit in Spokane, Washington, CPM Group executive Jeffrey Christian graduated from his usual distortions to outright contrivance.

The subject was one of the cables from the U.S. embassy in Beijing, China, to the State Department in Washington that were disclosed recently by the Wikileaks organization. Murphy characterized the cable as signifying the Chinese government's awareness of the Western central bank gold price suppression scheme.

Christian disputed that. He replied: "What the cable said was the Chinese government asked for information related to allegations that they'd heard in the market from GATA about that, and what would the U.S. government say in response to those allegations? It didn't say that the Chinese government believed it. ... That's typical of taking a piece of information and twisting it and dropping off a couple of important words and making it fit your theory as opposed to the reality."

In fact the cable, quoting commentary published in a Chinese government newspaper, Shijie Xinwenbao (World News Journal), on April 28, 2009, said nothing at all about allegations heard from GATA and made no inquiry of the U.S. government. Rather, the commentary quoted in the cable was exactly as Murphy characterized it: a flat-out assertion of gold price suppression. GATA didn't "twist" it or "drop off a couple of important words." Here is the text of the quotation in the cable:

"According to China's National Foreign Exchanges Administration, China's gold reserves have recently increased. Currently, the majority of its gold reserves have been located in the United States and European countries. The U.S. and Europe have always suppressed the rising price of gold. They intend to weaken gold's function as an international reserve currency. They don't want to see other countries turning to gold reserves instead of the U.S. dollar or euro. Therefore, suppressing the price of gold is very beneficial for the U.S. in maintaining the U.S. dollar's role as the international reserve currency. China's increased gold reserves will thus act as a model and lead other countries toward reserving more gold. Large gold reserves are also beneficial in promoting the internationalization of the renminbi."

The cable can be found here:

http://cables.mrkva.eu/cable.php?id=204405

And here:

http://www.gata.org/files/USEmbassyBeijingCable-04-28-2009.txt

The exchange about the cable during the debate at the Silver Summit begins at 15:40 in the video at Kitco here:

http://www.kitco.com/falltour2011/debate.html

During the debate Christian also sought to misrepresent Barrick Gold's motion to dismiss the federal anti-trust lawsuit brought against it by Blanchard Coin and Bullion, a motion in which Barrick sought to claim for itself the sovereign immunity of central banks against lawsuit. Indeed, for some time now Christian has been promoting a package of misrepresentations and distortions about some of the gold price suppression evidence collected by GATA, misrepresentations and distortions GATA answered in detail a year and a half ago here:

http://www.gata.org/node/8659

The guy isn't just misrepresenting and distorting now; he's making stuff up from scratch. But maybe we're lucky that this is the best the other side can do on the rare occasions when it comes out to answer for itself.

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