Ted Butler: The dumbest trade ever?

8:25p ET Monday, September 14, 2009

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold (and Silver):

In his commentary tonight, silver market analyst Ted Butler recounts just how stupid Barrick Gold's hedging program was for so long, and how much the company was warned against it, including by Butler himself.

No one has criticized Barrick more over the years than GATA. But it's hard not to wonder if Barrick's critics are not a bit like critics of Western central banks that have sold gold during the last decade. For these critics count only the losses in gold, not the gains to the Western central banks in preserving the international fiat money system, preserving the value of government currencies and bonds, and preserving the whole regime of market rigging generally and commodity price suppression particularly.

By this standard the central bank gold sales have been (so far) a huge success, and if, as some have long suspected, Barrick was not so much a gold mining company as the major contrivance by which Western central banks suppressed the gold price, a suspicion well supported by Barrick's confession in the Blanchard & Co. lawsuit -- http://www.gata.org/files/BarrickConfessionMotionToDismiss.pdf -- then Barrick too has been a huge success, just not for its shareholders, only its executives and directors and the central banks that lent it gold for price suppression.

Butler's commentary is headlined "The Dumbest Trade Ever?" and you can find it at GoldSeek's companion site, SilverSeek, here:

http://news.silverseek.com/SilverSeek/1252940702.php

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

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