Is GATA belaboring the obvious or what still can't be talked about?

2:15p ET Friday, September 25, 2009

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

GATA felt pretty good the other day when our lawyers extracted from a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System an admission that the Fed has gold swap arrangements with foreign banks and is concealing their documentation:

http://www.gata.org/node/7819

The admission contradicted the Fed's vigorous denial on the same point in 2001, though perhaps the gold swap arrangements now admitted had not yet been made back then. In any case, the admission seems to be the first from the U.S. government about its current involvement in the gold market, or contemplation of such involvement.

GATA's dispatch about the Fed's admission was quickly picked up by hundreds of financial-oriented Internet sites and blogs, if, not yet, any mainstream news organizations. We're confident that the disclosure will percolate through the gold universe pretty quickly.

But it was a little discouraging to find a particular comment posted by a reader at one of those Internet sites. She wrote that central bank intervention in the gold market to suppress the price was obvious and that GATA was just belaboring the obvious.

Of course it long has been beyond obvious to those of us in GATA, even as it cannot be reported in the mainstream financial media nor, it seems, by most gold market analysts. Indeed, even as GATA was criticized for belaboring the obvious, a prominent gold market analyst replied dismissively to a GATA supporter who sent him GATA's dispatch about the Fed. That analyst wrote:

"COMPLETE hocus-pocus. Who the ---- does GATA think it is? The U.S. government owes it NOTHING of an explanation. If gold is manipulated, WHY would you touch it? If gold HAD been manipulated, the $1,000 price would have NEVER materialized. Keep rooting for the masses, and revolution, and all that nonsense. The market is the market, and it WILL prove you (and them) wrong. Tinfoils, one and all. I am no guru, but at least I do not dwell on science-fiction stories. THEY make a living at it. Pathetic."

What -- the U.S. government owes its citizens no explanation of its activities in the markets?

Yes, that has seemed to be the Federal Reserve's view lately. But that is not how democracy is understood to operate. Otherwise the U.S. government would not be subject, however tentatively, to the Freedom of Information Act. Nor would the new U.S. president have declared, within a few days of his inauguration, that his administration would commence a new openness. Of course that proclamation was just a pose, but it was an acknowledgement of how things are supposed to be.

As for the gold market analyst's remark that gold never would have reached $1,000 if the market was manipulated, GATA would agree that, if they could arrange it, central banks would make gold so common that 1-ounce coins would be the prizes in Crackerjack boxes. But that gold has reached $1,000 doesn't make $1,000 a fair price and doesn't mean that central banks don't resist gold's rise surreptitiously as well as openly. That is only the historical record, as something posted today at the Zero Hedge Internet site emphasizes. It is a memorandum dated in 1968 and sent as a telegram from the U.S. Embassy in Paris to the secretary of state in Washington, and its topic is how U.S. officials can "remain the masters of gold." You can find it here:

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/declassified-state-dept-data-highlights...

Such a memorandum is not much of a revelation in the context of the London Gold Pool, which was operating openly at that time as the mechanism by which the United States and Great Britain fixed the gold price at $35 per ounce. There are other official documents from that era acknowledging the motive and intent of central banks to control the gold market and their readiness to be surreptitious about it, and GoldMoney founder and GATA consultant James Turk detailed one of them in January this year:

http://www.gata.org/node/7096

So why should anyone think that this motive and intent, the basic architecture of the Western world's financial system, have changed that much in 40 or 50 years?

Why should the desire for transparent, accountable government be equated with "rooting for the masses, and revolution, and all that nonsense"?

More important, why such anger at people who ask questions of a democratic government, and such a defense of enormous power exercised so secretly? Why such an aggressive desire not to know what is going on? How does any of that qualify anyone to be a market analyst?

As long as that does pass for analysis in the financial world, GATA really won't be belaboring the obvious, but belaboring what still can't be talked about.

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

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