3:55p ET Monday, March 8, 2010

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

GATA today delivered to the chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Gary Gensler, a letter from GATA Chairman Bill Murphy, appealing to the CFTC to act against the concentrated and manipulative short positions in the precious metals markets. The commission is expected to hold a hearing this month on establishing position limits in those markets. Murphy’s letter is appended.

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

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March 8, 2010

Gary Gensler, Chairman
U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission
3 Lafayette Centre
1155 21st St. NW
Washington, DC 20581

Dear Chairman Gensler:

The Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA) was formed in January 1999 to expose and oppose the manipulation and suppression of the price of gold. What we have learned over the past 11 years is of great importance in regard to the CFTC’s forthcoming hearings regarding position limits in the precious metals futures markets. Our efforts to expose manipulation in the gold market parallel those of Harry Markopolos to expose the Madoff Ponzi scheme to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Initially we thought that the manipulation of the gold market was undertaken as a coordinated profit scheme by certain bullion banks, like JPMorgan, Chase Bank, and Goldman Sachs, and that it violated federal and state anti-trust laws. But we soon discerned that the bullion banks were working closely with the U.S. Treasury Department and Federal Reserve in a gold cartel, part of a broad scheme of manipulation of the currency, precious metals, and bond markets.

As an executive at Goldman Sachs in London, Robert Rubin developed an idea to borrow gold from central banks at minimal interest rates (around 1 percent), sell the bullion for cash, and use the cash to fund Goldman Sachs’ operations. Rubin was confident that central banks would control the gold price with ever-more leasing or outright sales of their gold reserves and that consequently the borrowed gold could be bought back without difficulty. This was the beginning of the gold carry trade.

When Rubin became U.S. treasury secretary, he made it government policy to surreptitiously operate an identical gold carry trade but on a much larger scale. This became the principal mechanism of what was called the “strong-dollar policy.” Subsequent treasury secretaries have repeated a commitment to a “strong dollar,” suggesting that they were continuing to feed official gold into the market more or less clandestinely to support the dollar and suppress interest rates and precious metals prices.

Lawrence Summers, who followed Rubin as treasury secretary, was an expert in gold’s influence on financial markets. Previously, as a professor at Harvard University, Summers co-authored an academic study titled “Gibson’s Paradox and the Gold Standard,” (see Footnote 1 below) which concluded that in a free market gold prices move inversely to real interest rates, and, conversely, if gold prices are “fixed,” then interest rates can be maintained at lower levels than would be the case in a free market. This was the economic theory behind the “strong dollar policy.”

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan understood Summers’ research when he remarked at a 1993 meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee:

“I was raising the question on the side with Governor Mullins of what would happen if the Treasury sold a little gold in this market. There’s an interesting question here because if the gold price broke in that context, the thermometer would not be just a measuring tool. It would basically affect the underlying psychology.” (See Footnote 2 below.)

GATA has collected reams of evidence that Western central bank gold has long been mobilized and surreptitiously dishoarded to rig the gold market and influence related markets and that this rigging has drawn upon the U.S. gold reserves.

President Obama has called for greater transparency in both the federal government and the financial markets. In pursuit of such transparency GATA has made Freedom of Information Act requests to the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department for a candid accounting of their involvement in the gold market, particularly in regard to gold swaps. In a reply to GATA’s lawyers dated September 17, 2009, Fed Governor Kevin M. Warsh acknowledged that the Federal Reserve has gold swap agreements with foreign banks but insisted that such documents remain secret. (See Footnote 3 below.)

As a result, last December GATA sued the Federal Reserve in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, seeking access to the Federal Reserve’s withheld records of gold swaps.

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1:33a ET Saturday, February 27, 2010

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

GATA’s work and GATA board member Adrian Douglas’ report this week on the diminishing gold and silver stores of the New York Commodity Exchange (https://marketforceanalysis.com/index_assets/COMEX%20Inventory%20Shows%2…) figure heavily in the weekly Internet radio discussion of Agoracom founder George Tsiolis and Agoracom market analyst Peter Grandich. You can listen to the program here:

http://www.smallcapepicenter.com/Tsiolis-Grandich/26February2010/index.h…

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

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10:53p ET Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

GATA Chairman Bill Murphy will be interviewed from 10:30 to 11 a.m. ET tomorrow — Wednesday, February 24 — on the nationally syndicated G. Gordon Liddy radio program, which is broadcast live in 160 markets across the United States and via the Internet at www.RadioAmerica.org andwww.LiddyShow.com. The program is expected to be available in the archives at those Internet sites and we hope to distribute links to it as soon as it’s posted there.

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

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9:09p ET Saturday, February 20, 2010

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

Here’s an update to today’s dispatch about Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s appearance before congressional committees next week. It involves making personal contact with congressional staff members on Monday. E-mail to general congressional office e-mail addresses will almost certainly be ignored.

As you may have seen from the Bloomberg News story dispatched to you previously today,(http://www.gata.org/node/8352), Bernanke is to appear before the banking committees of Congress to present the Fed’s semi-annual report on the economy. Presumably Bernanke will be subjected to the usual questioning by committee members. The problem, of course, is that these questions are seldom very compelling and so elicit little about the Fed’s secret, market-manipulating actions.

With your help, we can change that next week.

After all, what if a committee member asked Bernanke about the Fed’s gold swap agreements with foreign banks, agreements the Fed admits having and insists on keeping secret, agreements about which GATA is suing the Fed for access under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act?

Of course Bernanke might weave, dodge, and evade such questions, but then the issue would be squarely on the table.

These are the key questions for Bernanke:

1) Will you confirm the substance of Fed Governor Kevin M. Warsh’s letter of September 17, 2009, to the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee, to the effect that the Fed has gold swap agreements with foreign banks and insists on keeping those agreements secret? (For a copy of Warsh’s letter, see http://www.gata.org/node/8192.)

2) What is the purpose of the Fed’s gold swap agreements?

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3:30p ET Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

GATA consultant Dimitri Speck is interviewed today by Lars Schall for the German Internet site of financial news and commentary, MMNews, about Speck’s new book about the international gold price suppression scheme, “Geheime Goldpolitik” — “Secret Gold Policy.” The interview is in German and is headlined “Es Ist keine Verschwörung, Sondern Politik” — “It’s No Conspiracy, But Politics” — and you can find it at MMNews here:

http://www.mmnews.de/index.php/201002104889/MM-News/Es-ist-keine-Verschw…

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committe

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8:50p ET Monday, February 8, 2010

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

While our hopes to have a documentary film made from GATA’s conference in Washington on April 18 and 19, 2008, have not been realized, videos of the 17 major presentations there now have been posted at the Vimeo.com Internet site, a site that allows videos to be posted in single segments longer than the 10 minutes allowed at YouTube.

A master listing of the videos of the GATA Washington conference presentations is available on two pages here:

http://vimeo.com/user2565624/videos/sort:alphabetic/format:detail

Below are the links for the individual presentations.

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10:40a MT Saturday, February 6, 2010

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

Interviewed this week by Eric King of King World News, Sprott Asset Management’s chief investment strategist, John Embry, elaborates on his address to the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference last night, speculates that the gold price would be double what it is now without the government-supported manipulation of the gold market, and laments the news media’s inclination to keep interviewing gold market experts who long have been wrong while ignoring GATA, which long has been right. The interview is a half hour long and you can listen to it at the King World News Internet site here:

http://www.kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/Broadcast/Entries/2010/2/6_Jo…

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

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4:45p ET Monday, January 25, 2010

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

GATA Chairman Bill Murphy and your secretary/treasurer will be interviewed about the international gold price suppression scheme for an hour Tuesday on financial letter writer Jay Taylor’s Internet radio program, “Turning Hard Times Into Good Times.” The program will be broadcast live at 3 p.m. ET (noon Pacific Time) at the Voice America Internet site here:

http://www.voiceamerica.com/voiceamerica/vshow.aspx?sid=1501

The program will be archived and accessible at the Voice America site soon after it’s finished.

Better still, perhaps, Taylor is inviting live calls to the program with questions and comments, and would especially like people who are skeptical about GATA’s work to call and ask questions or make critical observations. GATA long has lacked informed critics willing to debate the evidence of the gold price suppression scheme, and we would welcome such an exchange.

The telephone number to call to participate in “Turning Hard Times Into Good Times” is toll-free: 866-472-5790.

We’ll do our best to make it an interesting show.

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

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10:20a ET Sunday, January 10, 2010

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

A long unsigned essay posted today at Commodity Online, the Internet site based in Ahmedabad, the great commercial and industrial city of western India, takes long if terribly incomplete note of GATA’s work.

“But in the end,” the Commodity Online essay says, “the full-blown conspiracy theory seems to fall over because, like all good conspiracies, it requires too much collusion between many parties unlikely to sustain the necessary secrecy. It is difficult to believe that those who would have to be involved are really prepared to conduct a deception on the scale alleged by the GATA committee, and still keep it quiet.”

Of course participants in the gold price suppression scheme have not kept it quiet. While they have not sought to publicize it, they have often talked or written about it and their comments have been preserved in public record that remains fully available. No, the scheme has been kept quiet not by its participants but by a complacent, corrupted, ignorant, dense, or fearful financial news media, which declines to note and put together all the official admissions and documentations collected by GATA and others over the years, such as the many that can be found here:

http://www.gata.org/node/8052

And here:

http://www.gata.org/node/8208

And here:

http://www.gata.org/node/8209

These admissions, fully documented, come from, among other places, the top of the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Bank for International Settlements. Many of these admissions remain posted at official agency Internet sites. GATA wishes that anyone who knows the author of the Commodity Online essay would forward these admissions to him or her.

But at least the Commodity Online essay publicizes the gold price suppression issue, which is better than ignoring it, light years ahead of the U.S. financial press. The Commodity Online essay is headlined “Bullion: What Is Gold Conspiracy?” and you can find it here:

http://www.commodityonline.com/news/Bullion-What-is-gold-conspiracy-2460…

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

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9:45p ET Thursday, December 31, 2009

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

Al Korelin of the Korelin Economics Report interviewed your secretary/treasurer for a few minutes yesterday about GATA’s federal lawsuit against the Federal Reserve seeking disclosure of the Fed’s international gold swap agreements. You can listen to the interview at the Korelin Internet site here:

http://www.kereport.com/dailyshow/dailyupdate-dec3109-seg1.html

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

http://www.kereport.com/dailyshow/dailyupdate-dec3109-seg1.html

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

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