CNN, Bridge News, Yahoo, and AOL All Run With GATA Story

9:47a ET Monday, April 23, 2001

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

Here's a press release GATA distributed today in the
Washington area through Business Wire. Please use
it to make contact with your local news media or any
news organizations you're interested in contacting.
It may help.

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

* * *

Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee:
Exchange Stabilization Fund/Bundesbank Gold Swap Exposed

Business Editors

DALLAS -- (BUSINESS WIRE) -- April 23, 2001--The
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee will reveal proof of the
suppression of the gold price by the U.S. and German
governments and bullion banks at the GATA African Gold
Summit on May 10, 2001, in Durban, South Africa.

Attending will be government officials from South Africa
and other African gold-producing countries, representatives
of South Africa's National Union of Mineworkers, major gold
producers, and the world press.

For more than two years GATA has claimed that
the gold market has been manipulated lower by a faction
of the U.S. government and a cartel of bullion banks
to the detriment of mostly poor gold-producing nations.

One of the speakers at the Durban conference, GATA
consultant Reginald H. Howe, has brought suit in U.S.
District Court in Boston,against participants in the
scheme. The defendants are: the Bank for International
Settlements; Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Board of
Governors of the U.S. Federal Reserve System and a
director of the BIS; William J. McDonough, president
of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and a director
of the BIS; five major bullion banks, J.P. Morgan amp; Co.,
Chase Manhattan Corp., Citigroup Inc., Goldman Sachs
Group Inc., and Deutsche Bank; and Lawrence H. Summers,
former secretary of the treasury, who by law exercised
control over the U.S.Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF),
subject only to approval by the president.

On April 19, 2001, Reg Howe presented the following to the
court. It is posted at a href=http://www.gata.org/lawsuit.html.http://www.gata.org/lawsuit.html./a

quot;The Department of Justice's memorandum on behalf of the
Secretary of the Treasury's motion to dismiss asserts and
re-emphasizes the secretary's contention 'that in fact the ESF
has no holdings of gold and has not traded in gold or gold
derivatives since 1978.'

quot;The plaintiff has recently discovered a highly relevant
statement in the transcript of the Federal Open Market
Committee's meeting on January 31, 1995. Responding to
a question by then Fed Governor Lawrence Lindsey about
the ESF's legal authority to engage in a financial rescue
package for Mexico, J. Virgil Mattingly, the Fed's general
counsel, stated:

quot;'It's pretty clear that these ESF operations are authorized. I
don't think there is a legal problem in terms of the authority.
The statute (31 U.S.C. s. 5302) is very broadly worded in
terms of words like 'credit' -- it has covered things like the
gold swaps -- and it confers broad authority.'quot;

James Turk, who also will speak at the Durban conference,
revealed the following in a recent commentary, quot;Behind Closed
Doors,quot; which also can be read at
a href=http://www.gata.org/lawsuit.html.:http://www.gata.org/lawsuit.html.:/a

quot;The Treasury Department has changed the designation of nearly
1,700 tonnes of inventoried gold at the U.S. Mint's facility in West
Point, N.Y., which is approximately 21 percent of the total U.S.
gold reserve, from 'Gold Bullion Reserve' to 'Custodial Gold.'

quot;The August 2000 Status Report on U.S. Treasury-Owned gold
stored at West Point has a designation of 'Gold Bullion Reserve.'
But the September 2000 and subsequent status reports inexplicably
designate this same gold that is stored at the U.S. Mint at West
Point as 'Custodial Gold.'

quot;This change in the descriptive label for nearly 1,700 tonnes of gold
at West Point from 'Gold Bullion Reserve' to 'Custodial Gold' was
purposeful. It happened for a reason. This conclusion is all the more
plausible because the Treasury did not change the classification
from'Gold Bullion Reserve' to 'Custodial Gold' to describe the gold
stored in Fort Knox or at the U.S. Mint at Denver.quot;

Turk goes on to establish quot;that the ESF has 'gold swaps' with the
Bundesbank. According to Turk, quot;It therefore does not require
much conjecture to add one supposition to the equation by
concluding that the gold at West Point has been swapped with
gold owned by the Bundesbank, thereby necessitating its
reclassification from 'Gold Bullion Reserve' to 'Custodial Gold.'
The Treasury Department wanted to make gold available to some
bullion banks.quot;

quot;We now know what has happened. The Bundesbank has loaned
1,700 tonnes, half its 3,400 tonnes reserve; the other 1,700 tonnes
were swapped for gold in the U.S. reserves, requiring the change
in the West Point vault from 'Gold Bullion Reserve' to 'Custodial
Gold.'

quot;In other words, the Bundesbank's vault is empty because half its
gold is stored at West Point, not Europe, and the other half has been
loaned out.quot;

Further evidence of the GATA/Turk claims come from the Bundesbank
itself at:

a href=http://www.bundesbank.de/ezb/de/publications/pdf/http://www.bundesbank.d...
statintreserves.pdf

On Page 37 on the PDF file, some numerical examples of how the
accounting for gold reserves is done are given. Example 3 states:

quot;3. 20 Dec. 1999: 'A' undertakes a gold swap with the United States
Federal Reserve in which 'A' provides the Federal Reserve with
1,000 ounces of gold in exchange for USD 300,000, in currency.
The transaction will be reversed on 20 January 1999, at the spot
price of the gold prevailing in the market at that moment.quot;

GATA chairman Bill Murphy says: quot;The New York Federal Reserve
is an agent for the Exchange Stabilization Fund, and while these
numbers are small, it is clearly more evidence of a substantial
ESF/Bundesbank operation that James Turk refers to.

quot;This is most troubling, since both Mr. Greenspan directly and Mr.
Summers indirectly have asserted that neither the Federal
Reserve nor the secretary of the treasury acting through the ESF
has authority to manipulate dollar gold prices. In a letter to Sen.
Joseph I. Lieberman dated January 19, 2000, Greenspan stated
that transactions by the Federal Reserve quot;aimed at manipulating
the price of gold or otherwise interfering in the free trade of gold,
would be wholly inappropriate. quot;Similarly, officials who worked
under Secretary Summers, though not Summers himself, denied
any interventions in the gold market by the ESF and have made
those assertions in dozens of letters to congressmen and to
inquiring individuals all over the world.quot;

Murphy continues: quot;What is so disturbing is that a few bullion
banks and the ESF have made a State Department decision that
a privileged few in the financial world count, while the economies
and hundreds of millions of citizens of the poor gold-producing
countries in Africa do not. The ESF operation has suppressed
the price of gold hundreds of dollars below its natural equilibrium
price and deprived the natural resource-rich sub-Saharan African
countries of desperately needed money to fight crime, disease,
and unemployment.

quot;In the end this gold market collusion will make Watergate look
like child's play, as it impugns the proposal by the Clinton
administration to sell the gold of the International Monetary Fund
in the name of helping poor countries. It also may affect the
governments of Britain, Germany, and Switzerland in regard to
the motives of their recent gold sales and lending.quot;

CONTACT: Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc., Dallas
Bill Murphy, 214/522-3411
Midasnh@aol.com