Gold gets mere travelogue from Vanity Fair instead of investigative reporting

8:21a CT Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

Vanity Fair magazine this week publishes a long article about gold that is mostly just travelogue from mining venues and brief profiles of a few mining industry personalities and unfortunately touches only briefly on market manipulation.

The author, Matthew Hart, who is writing a book about gold, says this about the daily gold price "fixing" by the major bullion banks in London:

"The opacity of the fixing has a consequence: It's impossible to know if the price is being rigged. Because the banks own bullion, it's fair to wonder about this, and people do. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission in Washington began looking at the fixing early this year. According to The Wall Street Journal, the CFTC wanted to see if prices were being manipulated. The gold price determines the value of such derivatives as the $198 billion of precious-metals contracts held by U.S. banks last year."

And then Hart rushes away to the African bush.

Too bad. For any journalist who really wants to know whether the gold price is rigged needs only to put a few pointed questions to the biggest players in the gold market, central banks --

http://www.gata.org/node/13185

-- ordinary investigative reporting that is yet to be attempted by mainstream financial journalists in regard to gold, easy as it would be.

But any gold investor who is tired of the market rigging and yearning for the distraction of travelogue can find Hart's article, "All That Glitters," at Vanity Fair's Internet site here:

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2013/11/gold-secretive-trading-business

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