Armstrong says gold will rise when he gives the cue

5:03p ET Sunday, May 5, 2013

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

In his latest market letter, financial analyst and forecaster Martin Armstrong asserts astonishingly that it doesn't matter whether there is any gold in Fort Knox:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/05/02/is-there-gold-in-fort-knox/

Armstrong writes:

"That question is completely irrelevant. Why? Will it really make a difference? The stories of no gold in the vault are just spun by people so desperate to support a gold bull market it is just crazy.

"I was given a tour of the New York Fed years ago and there was gold there. The United States started going after the Swiss and threatening to seize their assets here in the United States for hiding Americans with assets. Without fanfare, the Swiss quietly took all their gold and moved it out of the United States. The stories spun around Germany were nonsense as well.

"Try looking at this dispassionately. This is not the stuff that is going to make gold rise. We do not need this type of tin-foil hat nonsense to create a bull market and it really does far more damage than the gold bugs suspect. People who are not buying gold refrain from doing so because of stories like that. They do not take all these claims seriously and perceive the idea of buying gold as the lunatic fringe when based on stories that cannot be proved.

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GATA has not been among those asserting that Fort Knox is empty. Rather, GATA has been pressing for a complete accounting of the U.S. gold reserve and our suspicion has been that, rather than having vanished entirely, the gold at Fort Knox and other U.S. government depositories is, to put it politely, oversubscribed, insofar as the Federal Reserve has admitted to GATA that it has secret gold swap arrangements with foreign banks --

http://www.gata.org/files/GATAFedResponse-09-17-2009.pdf

-- and a confidential March 1999 report of the International Monetary Fund found that Western central banks insist on secrecy for their gold swaps and leases because disclosure would impair their surreptitious interventions in the currency markets:

http://www.gata.org/node/12016

That Western central banks, including the U.S. Federal Reserve, are active surreptitiously in the gold market every day, often if not primarily through the Bank for International Settlements, is simply a matter of public record:

http://www.gata.org/node/11622

But we'll bet that either disclosure about the Fort Knox gold -- vanished or oversubscribed -- would have a transformative impact on the gold market that would leave investors indifferent to Armstrong's formulas of valuation. Can anyone really think that confirmation of the disappearance or impairment of the largest government gold reserve in the world, confirmation that the U.S. government has been both lying to the world and using its gold secretly for rigging the currency markets, would not signify even to people less brilliant and self-impressed than Armstrong that gold might be worth far more relative to government currencies?

Having been imprisoned longer on a charge of contempt of court than perhaps anyone in U.S. history in a case that troubled even a few constitutional scholars, Armstrong, of all people, might concede a little more skepticism about government here -- provided, of course, that refraining from the expression of too much skepticism is not a condition of his release.

Indeed, the nearly comprehensive secrecy spun by central banks about their gold reserves and gold trading gives the game away to anyone who wants to examine the evidence. Apparently Armstrong is among those market leaders who simply have been blinded to the evidence by their belief in their ideologies or proprietary formulas. That is, if they don't know about it already, it can't be happening. The world really is all about them.

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

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