Here''s what GATA wants to show the gold producers -- so help us!

1:16a ET Sunday, April 15, 2001

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

The journalist Anne Williamson spoke brilliantly to the
April 4 meeting of the Committee for Monetary Research
and Education in New York. Since her criticism of the
credit bubble is aimed at the international economic
order that GATA also is out to disturb, Williamson's
remarks may be of interest to you, so I'm appending
them here.

There is an equally insightful interview with
Williamson done by the national Catholic weekly
newspaper, The Wanderer, here:

a href=http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a38009e120c54.htmhttp://www.freerepubl...

In this interview Williamson explains how the U.S.
dollar and the International Monetary Fund are the
major instruments of imperialism and the export of
U.S. inflation.

This stuff may make Williamson the most subversive
journalist in the world today. Pray for her safety.

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

* * *

REMARKS TO THE COMMITTEE FOR
MONETARY RESEARCH AND EDUCATION
The Union Club, New York City, April 4, 2001

By Anne Williamson

When CMRE President Elizabeth Currier and I first
discussed what issue I might like to address this
evening, times were different. Investors still had hope
that the quot;Greenspan Putquot; would make matters right
again. Back then a discussion of Bubblevision's
cheerleading struck me as an interesting theme. But as
I said, times have changed. And though nothing like
capitulation has taken hold, the herd is stirring. So
it's time to stop clapping for Tinkerbell, and for us
all to go bottom fishing.

Sharp traders avail themselves of many tools when
attempting to discern and interpret market signals --
charts, graphs, indexes, moving averages, assorted
market theories, palm readers, whiskey and rye, and so
forth. I have no useful comment regarding these
methods, because I use something altogether different,
something that might surprise you.

But before revealing the method to my madness, I want
to share with you an anecdote from my years at
university. When I was but a young and winsome girl --
listen to the wind blow, fellas -- and first getting a
grip on the proper trilling of the Slavic quot;Rquot; while
puzzling over the complexity of glagolii dvizheniye,
myakii znaks, and predlogiis, I was required to take a
course called quot;How to Read a Russian Newspaper.quot;

That struck me as odd. After all, if one could master a
foreign language, wouldn't it follow that reading a
newspaper would be a natural act that did not require
any particular study?

Well, yes and no. You see, Soviet newspapers had a
particular set of challenges for students of the
Russian language. These challenges were ideological in
nature, and so the course about reading Russian
newspapers was really a course in learning Soviet
quot;code.quot;

For instance, we learned such curious things as that
the phrase quot;cosmopolitan elitequot; meant quot;Zionists,quot; and
that it was not permitted for the word quot;crisisquot; to
appear in any sentence or headline with the word
quot;Komsomolquot; -- quot;Young Communist League.quot;

We might laugh today, but I could teach the same sort
of course starting tomorrow to students of the English
language. And no better text could I have than The New
York Times, which, like the Fed, is a quasi-public
utility, giving each of us daily all the news America's
Ivy League socialists think we are fit to have.

After reading an article entitled quot;Following the Money,
But Also the Mind,quot; in the Feb. 11 issue of the Sunday
New York Times, it was clear to me something wicked was
coming this way, and that the predicate for a
beguilement was being laid. I speak of course of a new
discipline, quot;behavioral economics.quot; Quoting from the
article:

quot;Behavioral economists help to explain how booms
persist while busts are difficult to reverse. Their
research sheds light on why identity -- the traits
people assign to themselves and to others -- plays a
huge and often damaging role in the economy.quot;

I shudder to think of the implications of American
socialists applying identity politics to economics. But
here's the key point:

quot;And if the behaviorists prevail, the mainstream view
of a rational, self-regulating economy may well be
amended and policies adopted to control irrational,
sometimes destructive behavior. Twenty-five years of
deregulation might lose its appeal.quot;

I confess that in reading this article I was tempted to
think that history really does have a plan. After all,
the Ivy League's former heroes, the quot;quant jockeysquot; --
those neo-Keynesians who believe that all relevant
human action can be reduced to a mathematical formula
-- had been busy at taxpayers' expense foisting their
destructive and deceptive theories upon innocent people
around the world for over a decade. The subsequent ruin
of many a foreign country on the basis of their
miserable, ill-considered advice can be witnessed to
this day in Asia, Russia, Eastern Europe, and Latin
America.

But I fear that the most long-lived legacy of these
economists is the intellectual deceit in which they
engaged. While employing only the rhetoric of free
markets, and not the true methods of economic liberty,
they were in fact dispensing statism and cronyism.

There's nothing quot;free marketquot; about IMF subsidies to
corrupt regimes, about privatization in the absence of
property rights, about the extension of the U.S.'s
lunatic tax regime abroad, about the funding of state
gangsterism with other people's money, nor about the
establishment of paper currencies whose true lifeblood
is the printing press. All that is not even Keynesism,
but instead pure economic predation of the sort all
empires have engaged in since time immemorial.

And so the Ivy League's quant jockeys sallied forth,
their pockets stuffed with dollars to bring devaluation
and market collapse to tens of millions of people. What
they hadn't counted on was that the host country of
their presumed empire would, in time, experience the
same miserable result in a global boom gone bust. Today
Americans are faced with collapsing share values, and,
as a consequence, the cancellation of credit cards, the
foreclosure on loans extended for the purchase of homes
and automobiles, of corporate layoffs and of factory
cutbacks and/or relocations abroad to venues with lower
labor costs.

These results are not the quot;new eraquot; goods the Ivy
League's quant jockeys have been advertising these many
bubbly years.

In the certain absence of apology or remorse, what's
their defense to be?

I think we can all guess, even without the assistance
of The New York Times or the Ivy League's newest
generation of economists, the behaviorists. Clearly,
the defense of lamestream academics is that the problem
lies not with their theories nor with the greatest
expansion of cash, credit, and government favor in
world history, but with the people. Greed, most
especially that of the people, is the problem, they
will say. Just this morning did Steven Rattner of the
investment firm Quadrangle Group lay it out for us on
the Times's op-ed page. Here's what Mr. Rattner had to
say:

quot;We cannot expect miracles from the Fed, but only the
slow salve of interest rates gliding prudently down.
Instead of blaming Mr. Greenspan, we should reflect on
the willing suspension of disbelief that allowed us to
ignore everything we have been taught about sound
investing. We brought this period of drying out upon
ourselves.quot;

In other words, it's our own fault. Gee, and this from
the same crowd who has for years been hailing the
American consumer as the savior of the international
economy.

I resent the new propaganda's rationale as much as I
resented the false promises of a quot;new era.quot; I resent it
as much as I do Robert Shiller's very good book,
quot;Irrational Exuberance,quot; which -- after roaming far and
wide through media and psychology for 233 pages --
devotes but one page and four lines to the subject of
monetary policy and speculative bubbles. Therein
Professor Shiller informs the reader that the genesis
of a speculative bubble is quot;a long, slow process,
involving gradual changes in people's thinking.quot; Not a
word about the irresponsible expansion of money and
credit that are the very stimuli that lead to those
very quot;gradual changes in people's thinking.quot;

A great silence is what all these behaviorists share.
Not a one of them will discuss the true source of
bubbles, panics, and manias, which is not a predictably
responsive human psychology, but rather the secret and
destructive operations of a central bank.

To these men I say: Banks and citizens did with money
what they are supposed to do; they invested it. Just
because the money monopolists and their spokesman do
not address the Federal Reserve's having been engaged
in a money-printing mania does not make it any less
true.

Yet how convenient it is that the Ivy League now has a
small squandron of new theorists at the ready to
explain to the rest of us our stupidity and cupidity.
The implication is that they themselves -- the global
managerial class that itself is so very redolent of
Milos Djilas's quot;new classquot; -- are like gods, and if we
but listen to them and follow their edicts, all will be
well.

I assume they mean that all will be well just as it was
in Thailand, the Phillipines, Indonesia, South Korea,
Russia, Brazil, Argentina, and Turkey.

I shake my fist in their collective face.

The truth is that wealth -- real wealth that serves all
men in all places at all times -- is created for the
most part by people who do not speak second languages
and are not members of any faculty club. Educated or
not, and if American they are largely illiterate
nonetheless, for the most part they dress badly and
frequently have dirty fingernails. Their lives are
subject to all the disorder the raw impulses of human
nature compels.

But it is they who pour the steel, mine the earth's
treasures, bake the bread, and lay the bricks of the
very structures that support the fragile civilization
we still enjoy, however tenuously. We mock them and
their efforts to provide for themselves and their
families at our peril. It is they -- the mass of
humanity -- upon whom all of us must rely for
civilization's future, and when the greater of us suck
dry the lesser of us, we debase both ourselves and our
shared future.

The simple truth is that until we free money creation
from the manipulative hands of a self-proclaimed elite
and return government to its proper role as the
regulator of weights and standards -- and I do use
those words symbolically -- everything we treasure as
individuals and as a people is at risk.

And so when you read in The New York Times, as you
increasingly shall in coming days, of the behaviorist
economists, when their as-yet-obscure names are the
stuff of talk shows, scholarly journal articles, and
think-tank manifestos, only then will you be able to
say we've found the bottom.

After all, it's a tricky matter to decide at which
exact point the zeitgeist is to change from hailing
consumers as heroes to denigrating them as greedy
fools. The process of wealth destruction now afoot on
Wall Street will guide the media; they'll figure it
out, and they'll let us all know long after most of us
have stopped caring. And, again, that's when you'll
know the market has found its bottom.

I just hope that when we all get there, there's a drop
of liberty left.

In the meantime I'll keep praying that those human
bricks of civilization -- the toiling mass of mankind
-- are wise enough to resist the siren call of their
betters, who will surely be promising falsely a
perpetual security in return for the last of our
freedoms.