European banks may be ready for showdown over gold

By Bill Murphy
www.LeMetropoleCafe.com
August 31, 2000

Spot gold $277.20, up $3.70
Spot silver $4.96, up 5 cents

Today was the best trading day of the summer for gold
and silver. The dollar was very strong as it went into
new contract high ground. Oil set back temporarily
after its torrid run up.

Why the relatively big move for the precious metals?

Analysts on CNBC stumbled all day for an explanation
for the sudden strength in gold -- the strongest upward
price action of the entire summer. They did manage to
come up with one banal reason after another in ho-hum
delivery.

The usual suspects will crap all over me for this one,
but the only different news event was that GATA
Secretary/Treasurer Chris Powell and I pummeled the
Internet last night about the articles about GATA and
the manipulation of the gold price published by the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

I wrote:

quot;In the past week Germany's No. 1 newspaper,
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has published back-to-
back, unbylined stories about what the Gold Anti-Trust
Action Committee and its supporters have discovered
about the gold market.quot;

In addition, and much more important, the bombshell
second FAZ story was read all over Germany yesterday.
We have been told by the best of sources that anybody
who is anybody in the gold business in Germany and
Switzerland has read the FAZ articles.

More significantly and from the feedback GATA is
receiving, the feeling is that these stories well could
have been planted by the Bundesbank. Whoever wrote
these stories did his homework. They are so on-the-
money that it is if GATA wrote the articles and
submitted them to the FAZ. They cover most of our
salient points in succinct and accurate fashion.

Stories such as that even MENTION manipulation of the
gold market by the U.S. government to the detriment of
the poor gold-producing countries hardly ever get
printed by anyone, anywhere -- much less by Germany's
most respected newspaper.

We will probably never know the real story behind the
FAZ stories, but the odds are that the Germans are very
unhappy with what is going on in gold. We know that the
Bundesbank and Bank for International Settlements
received copies of GATA's Gold Derivative Banking
Crisis report months ago. It could not be more clear
that they reviewed what the GATA delegation presented
to the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives,
Dennis Hastert and many other U.S. politicians.

There is reason to believe that this is a warning to
the gold cabal that Germany believes that GATA is
correct and that Germany considers very dangerous what
the cabal is doing. The FAZ articles were very clever.
They let GATA make the accusations; they do not have to
get their own hands dirty. The articles just let
everyone know that the German financial authorities
know and that they might just have to do something
about it before the gold banking crisis explodes.

The FAZ articles certainly have put Germany's own of
Deutsche Bank on notice, as well as the rest of the
gold manipulation crowd.

Commentary at www.LeMetropoleCafe.com has never been
more insightful. First on oil, then on silver, then on
the CRB, which is right at new contract highs at 227+,
and now on gold. This can all be corroborated by
reviewing recent commentaries at the James Joyce Table.

The bottom line is this:

* Commodity prices are going higher.

* Silver and gold have bottomed and are going higher.
When the manipulation crowd is overpowered or loses
control of their illegal activities, the prices of gold
and silver will soar.

* That may happen sooner than the uninformed may think.

Let the good times roll. Yes, dawn has arrived.