The silence of the blockheads -- maybe soon to be dead silence

9:49p ET Monday, December 2, 2013

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

Noting that the price of gold is starting to fall below the cost of production, Zero Hedge observes tonight: "Not even Bernanke, Yellen, or all the paper gold exchange-traded funds in the world will be able to do much to suppress gold prices from reaching their fair value when gold production hits a standstill and when demand, especially by China, is still in the hundreds of tons each year."

The Zero Hedge commentary speculates about the gradual shutdown, company by company, of the gold mining industry as production costs cannot be recovered. It's headlined "Gold Drops Below Cash Cost, Approaches Marginal Production Costs" and it's posted here:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-12-02/gold-tumbles-towards-marginal-p...

Of course there's no telling when enough of the world outside of a few central banks will wise up to paper gold and when the central banks that have been leasing and swapping their metal surreptitiously for price suppression will run out of metal they're prepared to lose, just as the central banks operating the London Gold Pool reached that threshold in March 1968. The next moment of transition might be many years away, or it could come tomorrow. (Most likely it will be a Sunday night U.S. Eastern time, which is when such things are usually sprung on the world by its unelected rulers.)

What may be most remarkable about the present is the silence of the gold mining industry and its supposed representative, the World Gold Council -- silence that, as the Zero Hedge commentary suggests, soon may be dead silence.

The proof of surreptitious intervention against gold by central banks has reached towering proportions --

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

-- and the destruction of the gold mining industry's capital has become catastrophic:

http://tinyurl.com/q2dwryf

But on the whole the industry is dumber than the rocks it mines, just as the entire gold sector -- including mining company investors and adherents of free and transparent markets in the monetary metals -- has been demoralized into silence as well.

Financially pressed is one thing; demoralized is something else. GATA is financially pressed too; it runs on donations that have shrunk to almost nothing with the gold sector's decline, and so GATA's operations likely will be sharply curtailed in the new year. But GATA will keep the flag flying as long as the electric and Internet service bills can be paid out of the pockets of its officers. If you're still invested in mining companies and have not contacted them about GATA's work, what's your excuse? Is the end of the gold mining industry really a prerequisite for the liberation of the price of its product?

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