CNBC Europe spells 'gold manipulation' right

9:10p ET Friday, August 28, 2008

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

Somehow the issue of manipulation of the gold market made its way onto CNBC Europe today as the business channel interviewed Evy Hambro, portfolio manager for BlackRock Investment Management in London, and Jill Leyland, an analyst for the World Gold Council.

The program was terribly clumsy with the facts, as the moderator announced that the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission had issued a report suggesting that the gold market had been manipulated by certain banks. Actually, of course, the recent disclosures about the unprecedented concentration in short positions in gold and silver on the U.S. commodities exchanges came from GATA consultants Ted Butler and Rob Kirby, not from the CFTC, though Butler and Kirby might be glad to accept appointment to the commission. And another CNBC interviewer talked about world gold supplies of "500 million tonnes," when the best estimate of all the gold ever mined is less than 170,000 tonnes. (The interviewer probably was thinking of the 500-tonne annual sales limit imposed on the parties to the Washington Agreement on Gold.)

But at least CNBC Europe managed to spell "gold manipulation" right, reported the shortage of U.S. gold eagle coins, and allowed Hambro to remark with British understatement that recent reversals in several markets, not just gold, were hard to explain. And Leyland's curt assurance that nothing possibly could be wrong in the gold market might have struck impartial observers as a little smug and arrogant.

As it turned out, the manipulation issue was only raised on the program; the program did not cite a single piece of evidence, apart from the misattribution to the CFTC of the work of Butler and Kirby. But maybe the network was expecting everybody to have the wit to look for the evidence at www.GATA.org.

The CNBC Europe program is 7 1/2 minutes long and you can watch it at the CNBC site here:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=835874978&play=1

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

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