Bugs were right about derivatives disaster, Citigroup analysts say

10:30a ET Friday, September 19, 2008

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

MineWeb's Dorothy Kosich writes about a new report from Citigroup analysts John H. Hill and Graham Wark, who last year wrote a report acknowledging that central banks were strategically intervening in the gold market to suppress gold's price. You can find their report from last year here:

http://www.gata.org/files/CitigroupGoldReport092107.pdf

Now, Hill and Wark write, they're surprised that gold isn't already at $2,000 per ounce. Of course having already conceded central bank intervention, maybe they shouldn't be so surprised. But maybe it would be impossibly impolitic for them to write openly about intervention again now, especially since, as Kitco's Jon Nadler and Resource Investor's Tim Wood might assure us, the precious metals markets are the only markets in which central banks have NOT been intervening lately.

But the new report from Hill and Wark may be most satisfying to our side for another acknowledgement. As reported by Kosich, Hill and Wark write:

"It is notable that hard-core goldbugs have been proven correct in the decade-long contention that an overwhelmingly vast and complex pool of nested financial derivatives would ultimately result in cascading defaults and ruin for major portions of the banking system."

You can find the MineWeb account of the Citigroup report here:

http://www.mineweb.com/mineweb/view/mineweb/en/page33?oid=62900&sn=Detail

You can find the new Citigroup gold report, "Opening the 'New Gold Window,'" here:

http://www.gata.org/files/CitigroupGoldReport-09-17-2008.pdf

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

* * *

GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at http://www.gata.org/.