Chris Powell: Remarks to the 2009 New Orleans Investment Conference

Remarks by Chris Powell
Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
New Orleans Investment Conference
Hilton Riverside Hotel
Thursday, October 8, 2009

On Friday, September 25, Jim Rickards, director of market intelligence for the Omnis consulting firm in McLean, Va., was interviewed at length on the cable television network CNBC. Talking about the currency markets, Rickards remarked: “When you own gold you’re fighting every central bank in the world.”

That’s because gold is a currency that competes with government currencies and influences interest rates and the prices of government bonds.

Of course such an assertion in itself was no surprise to my organization, the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee. To the contrary, that assertion has been our premise for most of our 10 years and we have documented it extensively. It was spectacular that an analyst should have expressed it in the mainstream financial news media and have been allowed to keep talking. But since we met here in New Orleans last year there have been many spectacular disclosures of what central banks meant to be surreptitious intervention in the currency markets to suppress the price of gold — particularly intervention by the central bank of the United States.

You may have heard GATA derided as a “conspiracy theory” organization. We’re not that at all. To the contrary, we examine the public record, produce documentation, question public officials, and publicize their most interesting answers, or refusals to answer. I’d like to review the spectacular disclosures of the last year.

First, in January, was the discovery of a 16-page unsigned memorandum in the archive of the late Federal Reserve Chairman William McChesney Martin:

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

The memorandum is dated April 5, 1961, and is titled “U.S. Foreign Exchange Operations: Needs and Methods.” It is a detailed plan of surreptitious intervention to rig the currency and gold markets to support the dollar and to conceal, obscure, or falsify U.S. government records and reports so that the rigging might not be discovered. This document remains on the Internet site of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Then in August the international journalist Max Keiser reported an interview with the Bundesbank, Germany’s central bank, in which he was told that all of Germany’s gold reserves were held in New York:

http://www.gata.org/node/7672

Some people saw that admission as a suggestion that Germany’s gold had become the tool of the U.S. government. GATA consultant Rob Kirby of Kirby Analytics in Toronto then pressed the Bundesbank for clarification. On August 24, the Bundesbank replied to Kirby by e-mail with a denial of Keiser’s report that was actually pretty much a confirmation:

http://www.gata.org/node/7713

“The Deutsche Bundesbank,” the reply said, “keeps a large part of its gold holdings in its own vaults in Germany, while some of its gold is also stored with the central banks located at major gold trading centers. This,” the Bundesbank continued, “has historical and market-related reasons, the gold having been transferred to the Bundesbank at these trading centers. Moreover, the Bundesbank needs to hold gold at the various trading centers in order to conduct its gold activities.”

The Bundesbank didn’t specify those “gold activities” and those “trading centers.” But those “activities” can mean only that the Bundesbank is or recently has been surreptitiously active in the gold market.

Then last month an financial market professional and student of history named Geoffrey Batt posted at the Zero Hedge Internet site three declassified U.S. government documents involving the gold market.

The first was a long cable dated March 6, 1968, from someone named Deming at the U.S. Embassy in Paris to the State Department in Washington:

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

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