Noting that markets have been destroyed, Chris Martenson earns his tinfoil hat

11:38a ET Saturday, December 15, 2012

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

With his commentary this week Chris Martenson became the latest financial writer to earn his tinfoil hat.

"Once upon a time," Martenson writes, perhaps with a weary glance at GATA, "it would have been considered in bad taste to suggest that the world was being centrally managed in secret by a smallish cabal of bankers whose actions served to either prop up the excessive spending habits of the very governments that conferred upon them the power to print money or to bolster the health and profits of the banks they mainly serve. That was then. Today you can just read about it in the Wall Street Journal."

Martenson then cites a report from Wednesday's Wall Street Journal about central bankers having lovely dinners at private meetings at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, during which they secretly experiment with and decide the fate of the world --

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732371700457815715246448659...

-- a report that your secretary/treasurer didn't even bother to call to your attention because you have heard it dozens of times from GATA already.

... Dispatch continues below ...

"I don't really think that gold's current market price or recent behavior have anything useful to do with gold's value here. ... [S]ome entity has been selling literally thousands and thousands of gold contracts into the thinly traded overnight markets so rapidly that we have to use millisecond charting to see it for what it is. Again, there is no other legitimate explanation for this activity of which I am aware besides having an intent of pushing the price down.

"Whether there is some motivation for this activity besides 'making money,' I remain convinced that the gold market, like many others, is no longer sending useful price signals. Instead it is telling us that some entity has found it useful to sell thousands of gold contracts all at once.

"The interesting part of this story is that this has been the most sustained, intensive, and yet ineffective gold selling that I have yet seen. In the past, such bear raids, as they are called, would have resulted in a sharply lower gold price. Right now that has not yet really happened.

"I am wondering if a big up move is not right around the corner for gold. I can tell you that if even one fourth of the recent quantitative easing effort was announced five years ago, markets would have exploded and gold would have absolutely launched."

Martenson's commentary, posted at his Internet site, Peak Prosperity, begins with "QE 4: Folks, This Ain't Normal" --

http://www.peakprosperity.com/blog/80251/qe-4-folks-aint-normal

-- and concludes with "My Thoughts on Gold":

http://www.peakprosperity.com/insider/80252/better-year-early-day-late

Quite apart from the extensive documentation GATA has published of central banking's gold price suppression scheme --

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

-- including, last week, still another smoking gun (actually, more like a howitzer), the International Monetary Fund's 1999 report explaining that central banks insist on concealing their gold loans and swaps to facilitate secret market intervention --

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

-- gold price suppression particularly and commodity price suppression generally are only the logical consequences of central banking's purpose and policy of inflation. The British economist Peter Warburton figured this out a decade ago long before GATA had amassed most of its documentation of central banking's continuing war against gold:

http://www.gata.org/node/8303

None of this can be discussed in the polite company of the mainstream financial news media because if it was ever understood that there are no markets anymore, just interventions (http://www.gata.org/node/6242), everything about the markets would fall apart as the participants left in search of other methods of at least preserving if not growing their wealth.

Martenson suggests as much: "The markets are now well and truly broken -- not because they don't conform to my predictions but because they are no longer sending useful price signals. Instead, my hypothesis here is that the markets are now just a giant and rigged casino."

GATA Chairman Bill Murphy and your secretary/treasurer hope to discuss these points next Tuesday afternoon on the "Capital Account" program hosted by Lauren Lyster on the Russia Today network, which lately is sort of like Radio Free America.

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

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