Price suppression may end by itself, but not as fast

2:49p ET Saturday, May 1, 2010

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold (and Silver):

Alerted by our friend F.R. to yesterday's GATA Dispatch decrying the abuse of financial letter writer Marc Faber by people urging support of GATA (http://www.gata.org/node/8592), Faber has sent GATA a brief statement acknowledging suppression of gold and silver prices:

"My position is very simple," Faber writes. "I am grateful that precious metal prices have been manipulated down, so it gave me and my readers the opportunity to buy gold and silver at artificially depressed prices for the last 10 years. Eventually, if GATA is right, prices will explode on the upside."

(For information about Faber's letter, the Gloom, Boom, & Doom Report, please visit http://www.gloomboomdoom.com.)

GATA's officers also are glad to have gotten into the precious metals many years ago. But some people carry their acknowledgement of precious metals price manipulation a little too far -- carry it to acceptance and even indifference if not approval.

GATA first may have run into such attitudes with financial letter writer Dennis Gartman (http://www.thegartmanletter.com), who, while not quite acknowledging gold and silver price manipulation then (he since has come a lot closer), advised some of GATA's officers during the Vancouver conference a few years ago to consider it just a great opportunity to make money.

Concurring with Gartman, the other day our friend Mike Maloney, a metals dealer and market analyst, remarked of the manipulation of the precious metals market, "Let them manipulate it as long as they can," because the longer the manipulation lasts, the higher metals prices will go when the free market defeats the manipulation:

http://goldsilver.com/newsletters/newsID/7901/

And this month Vedant Mimani and Pratik Sharma of Atyant Capital Partners in Boca Raton, Florida, (http://atyantcapital.com/) produced a long report concluding, on its last page:

"The gold market is a manipulated market. It has been since the beginning of governments. Accept this fact and learn how to trade the market instead of complaining about it."

You can find the Atyant Capital report here:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/30714154/Final-Why-George-Soros-and-John-Pauls...

GATA has a few problems with such attitudes.

First, time is money. The eventual establishment of free markets in the precious metals will be little consolation to those precious metals investors who don't live long enough to see it happen. Many such investors have died since the manipulation became especially heavy-handed around 1995. They were profoundly cheated and there can be no justice for them. Other precious metals investors may not live very long after the manipulation ends. Unless they can find a way to take their winnings with them, they will have been profoundly cheated too.

Second, while market forces may overwhelm the manipulation eventually, the end of the manipulation can be hastened by education and agitation. That is what GATA was chartered to undertake, not to sit around smugly and wait for supposed nature to take its course.

Third, while there is one great economic certainty -- that Western currencies will be substantially devalued, Western central banking having been invented precisely to devalue the currency -- there is also one great economic uncertainty -- how, upon that substantial devaluation, governments will treat the private ownership of the precious metals. Precious metals in possession may have no counterparty risk, but they never will be able to escape political risk. Confiscation or disproportionate new capital gains taxes could take a lot of the fun out of owning them and mining shares, and even precious metals investors who still have long lives ahead of them when the price suppression ends could find themselves cheated of the rewards that were due to them years earlier while the suppression and different rules of ownership were still in force.

And fourth, regardless of everything else, the manipulation of precious metals prices is a cosmic deception and fraud, and the great enabler of all sorts of vast evils -- from what U.S. Rep. Ron Paul has called "the welfare/warfare state" to the expropriation and grinding down of the working class and the developing world by the financial class, a vile national and class imperialism -- in the here and now. People are suffering and even dying every day all over the world because of this fraud, and no eventual profit to gold and silver investors can ever undo that.

The people behind GATA would like to make money as much as anyone else, and we would not like to be forced to choose between making money or doing some good in the world. We are not monks or hermits -- we enjoy good lives -- and some of us have families to support. To us the ideal has seemed to be to try to prosper in the course of doing some good. If we could blow up the manipulation today, this very instant, even if waiting a week or a month or a year might profit us more, we'd be obliged to blow it up right now. If we ever have such an opportunity, we will seize it.

In the meantime we make progress every day. Even cynical urgings like those from Atyant Capital -- just make money off the manipulation and stop complaining about it -- advance our progress, because they spread the word and show that increasingly the manipulation is taken for granted in the most informed circles. The recent news shows that the bad guys are worried, possibly even on the run already. So:

... Say not the struggle naught availeth,
... The labor and the wounds are vain,
... The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
... And as things have been they remain.

Things are changing, and the more we all do, the faster they'll change.

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

To contribute to GATA, please visit:

http://www.gata.org/node/16