World Gold Council plans another seminar for people who don't think about gold

10:47a ICT Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

Contradicting the repeated assertions of a member of its Board of Directors, Franco-Nevada Chairman Pierre Lassonde, that central bankers "spend no time whatsoever thinking about gold" --

http://www.gata.org/node/13683

http://www.gata.org/node/13685

http://www.gata.org/node/13105

http://www.kitco.com/news/video/show/GSA-Investor-Day-2014/558/2014-02-2...

-- the World Gold Council is planning another installment of its Executive Program in Gold Reserves Management in association with the University of California at Berkeley from April 28 to May 2:

http://executive.berkeley.edu/programs/executive-program-gold-reserves-m...

Among the topics on the agenda --

http://executive.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/program_pdfs/Schedule%...

-- are "Trading, Clearing, and Vaulting Gold in the Loco London Market," "Optimizing Gold's Performance in Local Currency," and "Gold Market Trading Strategies," topics that imply that gold actually gives central bankers plenty to think about after all and that gold is far more than a dead asset merely gathering dust in a vault.

Another agenda item of special interest is "Accounting for Gold Reserves," which perhaps will address the fears of Western central bankers recorded by the secret report of the staff of the International Monetary Fund in March 1999 --

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

-- fears that an honest accounting of gold reserves, distinguishing gold swaps and leases from unimpaired reserves, would compromise the secret interventions of central banks in the gold and currency markets.

Unfortunately the World Gold Council's program at UC Berkeley again will be open only to people who "spend no time whatsoever thinking about gold" -- open only to "central bankers and finance ministry officials," not to the public and not even to gold mining company executives. A respected market analyst cordial to GATA applied to attend last year's program but was rejected.

While the World Gold Council calls itself "the market development organization for the gold industry" --

http://www.gold.org/about-us

-- such secrecy with its programs is a strange way of developing a market. More likely, of course, the council sees its primary work as being to help central banks prevent a free market from developing in gold, and that work necessarily involves concealing the activity of central banks in the market, which is where Lassonde's disinformation campaign comes in.

Maybe Kitco News, which happily transmits Lassonde's disinformation, could arrange to interview him at UC Berkeley in April for another one of his Leslie Nielsen impersonations:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSjK2Oqrgic

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