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Has Barry Ritholtz ever questioned a central bank about gold?
5:20p ET Friday, April 19, 2013
Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
Your secretary/treasurer's appearance Wednesday on Yahoo's "Daily Ticker" program with Aaron Task (http://www.gata.org/node/12464) provoked a response today when the program interviewed Barry Ritholtz, CEO of research firm Fusion IQ, who likened GATA to pigs and religious jihadists while not really seeming to understand the organization's complaint and objectives.
In commentary published along with video of Ritholtz's interview, Task quotes from a recent essay by Ritholtz purporting to identify "The 12 (Misguided) Commandments of Gold Bulls," two of which deal with market manipulation. But at the conclusion of his interview today, Ritholtz seems to concede that the gold market is manipulated, even as he concludes that it's no big deal and that gold is just another trade.
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Not being an investment adviser, GATA does not argue trading strategy. Rather, we would dispute that gold has no more importance than any other trade; we see gold as being at the center of the world financial system, a determinant of currency values, interest rates, and government bond prices, and we see a free and transparent gold market as the prerequisite of free and transparent markets everywhere.
We also would dispute Ritholtz's explanation for the recent plunge in the gold price -- that gold was just an inflation trade and that traders dumped it upon concluding that "quantitative easing" was not generating the inflation expected by a high gold price.
We would ask Ritholtz why he seems confident that the recent plunge in gold had nothing to do with central bank intervention; if he is familiar with the gold trading accounts of the Bank for International Settlements and those of its member central banks; and if he has ever browsed GATA's documentation file --
http://www.gata.org/taxonomy/term/21
-- and gotten curious about anything there, like the secret International Monetary Fund report disclosing that Western central banks conceal their gold swaps and leases to facilitate their surreptitious interventions in the currency markets (http://www.gata.org/node/12016); the BIS PowerPoint presentation that is shown to potential central bank members and that advertises, among BIS services, secret interventions in the gold market (http://www.gata.org/node/11012); former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker's grudging admission that central banks need to intervene in the gold market to stabilize their currencies at a "critical point" (http://www.gata.org/node/10923); and the many demonstrations of the overwhelming secrecy that central banks, including the Federal Reserve, weave around their gold policies, secrecy that can be pierced only with litigation (http://www.gata.org/node/9917).
Indeed, we would ask Ritholtz if he has ever tried putting a question about gold to any central bank or if he considers central banks irrelevant to the gold market even though they are its biggest participants.
We'd happily endure more name calling for a chance to review the documentation with Ritholtz on another edition of the "Daily Ticker" program or in another forum.
Ritholtz's appearance on the "Daily Ticker" and Task's commentary quoting his mockery of gold bugs can be found at the Yahoo Finance Internet site here:
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/12-misguided-commandments-go...
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
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