Remarks by Chris Powell, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
International Precious Metals and Commodities Show
Olympia Park, Munich, Germany
Saturday, November 7, 2009

Thank you for coming to listen to me today. Please forgive my inability to speak German. I’ll be discussing many documents, some of them fairly complicated, but don’t worry if you miss something about them. They’ll be posted at GATA’s Internet site with these remarks.

On Friday, September 25, Jim Rickards, director of market intelligence for the Omnis consulting firm in McLean, Virginia., was interviewed on the cable television network CNBC in the United States. 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 has a powerful influence on interest rates and the price of government bonds. And that’s why central banks long have tried to suppress the price of gold. Gold is the ticket out of the central banking system, the escape from coercive central bank and government power.

As an independent currency, a currency to which investors can resort when they are dissatisfied with government currencies, gold carries the enormous power to discipline governments, to call them to account for their inflation of the money supply and to warn the world against it. Because gold is the vehicle of escape from the central bank system, the manipulation of the gold market is the manipulation that makes possible all other market manipulation by government.

Of course what Jim Rickards said about gold was no surprise to my organization, the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee. To the contrary, what Rickards said has been our premise for most of our 10 years, and we have documented it extensively. Rickards’ assertion was spectacular simply because he was allowed to make it in the mainstream financial news media and was allowed to keep talking. While the gold price suppression scheme is a hard fact of history, it is seldom mentioned in polite company in the financial world. I have been asked to talk about it here. I am grateful for this invitation and I will try to be polite.

How have central banks tried to suppress the price of gold?

The gold price suppression scheme was undertaken openly by governments for a long time prior to 1971.

That’s what the gold standard was about — governments fixing the price of gold to a precise value in their currencies, a price at which governments would exchange their currencies for gold, currencies that were backed by gold.

Though the gold standard was abandoned during World War I, restored briefly in the 1920s, and then abandoned again during the Great Depression, that was not the end of government efforts to control the gold price. Throughout the 1960s the United States and Great Britain attempted to hold the price at $35 in a public arrangement of the dishoarding of U.S. gold reserves. This arrangement came to be known as the London Gold Pool.

As monetary inflation rose sharply, the London Gold Pool was overwhelmed by demand and was shut down abruptly in April 1968. Three years later, in 1971, the United States repudiated the remaining convertibility of the dollar into gold — convertibility for government treasuries that wanted to exchange dollars for gold. At that moment currencies began to float against each other and against gold — or so the world was told.

For since 1971 the gold price suppression scheme has been undertaken largely surreptitiously, seldom acknowledged officially. But sometimes it has been acknowledged officially, and with a little detective work, more about it can be discovered.

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

The gold price suppression scheme became a matter of public record in January 1995, when the general counsel of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, J. Virgil Mattingly, told the Federal Open Market Committee, according to the committee’s minutes, that the U.S. Treasury Department’s Exchange Stabilization Fund had undertaken gold swaps. Gold swaps are exchanges of gold allowing one central bank to intervene in the gold market on behalf of another central bank, potentially giving anonymity to the central bank that wants to undertake the intervention. The 1995 Federal Open Market Committee minutes in which Mattingly acknowledges gold swaps are still posted at the Fed’s Internet site:

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12:04p ET Sunday, October 18, 2009

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

Trace Mayer, proprietor of RunToGold.com, was interviewed for six minutes October 9 by Michael Hainsworth on Business News Network in Canada and discussed at length the central bank gold price suppression scheme, which Mayer said was characterized by the “Greenspan call,” which now is being offset by the “Beijing put.” Mayer did an excellent job in getting the purposes of the scheme across in a brief time, just as Hainsworth’s questions signified that he understood the gold issue thoroughly. You’ll probably never see anything like this exchange on U.S. television, so U.S. citizens will just have to be thankful that there’s a free press next door. You can watch the BNN interview with Mayer at the BNN archive here:

http://watch.bnn.ca/the-close/october-2009/the-close-october-9-2009/#cli…

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

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11:50a ET Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

Market analyst Martin Hutchinson’s latest column, published this week at Prudent Bear, acknowledges the likelihood that central banks will try to manipulate the price of gold so that they might avoid having to do anything about the difficult problems signified by a rising gold price.

Hutchinson’s commentary takes note of the Financial Times story GATA brought to your attention last week with a little preface of commentary, “Ohmigod! Commodity Investors Might Have to Buy … Actual Commodities”:

http://www.gata.org/node/7869

Hutchinson writes:

“Given the predilections of today’s policymakers, it is unfortunately unlikely that they will tighten monetary policy sufficiently to break the commodity flight, whatever the gold price does. Instead, led by the determined Keynesians of the International Monetary Fund, they are much more likely to attempt to control the gold price itself, either surreptitiously by selling off massive quantities of the world’s gold reserves, or openly by imposing limits on gold futures trading and possibly, like Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, making it illegal for ordinary individuals to own gold or to buy gold futures.

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6:34p ET Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

ay Taylor, editor of J. Taylor’s Gold, Energy, and Tech Stocks letter (http://www.miningstocks.com), today interviewed your secretary/treasurer on his weekly Internet radio program. The discussion centered on the specific evidence of the gold price suppression scheme of the Western central banks. The part with your secretary/treasurer begins at 18:30 into the program and you can find it here:

http://www.modavox.com/voiceamerica/vepisode.aspx?aid=38737

But you might find the beginning of the program interesting too and so might want to listen to the whole thing.

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

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6:54p ET Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

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By Adrian Douglas
Friday, March 6, 2009

I am excited to report on a GATA bombshell.

Two weeks ago I was contacted by Marina Portnaya of Russia Today TV. This is an international 24/7 English-language news channel. They are broadcast in more than a hundred countries and are broadcast in the New York area on Channel 135 on Time Warner Cable TV. Apparently Russia Today is also broadcast in Washington and San Francisco. You can check out their Internet site:

http://www.russiatoday.ru

Marina asked to interview me on camera about the surge in gold demand, my predictions of a bond market collapse, and my thoughts on the Obama administration’s stimulus package. This seemed like a big opportunity for GATA so I re-organized my schedule so that I could go to Russia Today’s New York studio for an interview.

The interview was filmed on Thursday. We had planned 45 minutes together but the cameras were rolling for almost 90 minutes. Marina was enthralled and shocked by what I disclosed to her, the biggest Ponzi scheme in history. I had sent her several pages of background information before the interview and would not have been surprised if I had been classified as “too hot to handle” and the interview was canceled. It was not.

When I met Marina Portnaya I quickly understood that despite being young she is a journalist of the old school. She is passionate about reporting facts and truthfully. She is a true patriot deeply concerned about the way the United States has been brought to its knees by a powerful elite.

We got into how the manipulation of the gold market is at the center of the destruction of the financial system — how switching off the fire alarm of gold allowed interest rates to be artificially low and the dollar M3 money supply to be promiscuously increased without most people noticing that there was anything wrong. This allowed the United States to live beyond its means for so long and to abuse its responsibility of managing the world’s reserve currency.

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5:22p ET Thursday, February 26, 2009

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

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11:20p ET Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

When Lord Keynes made his celebrated comment about gold being the “the barbarous relic” he was referring to events as far back as Gutenberg.

With movable type, paper money became feasible. But the Gutenberg revolution also led to the spread of learning, the Renaissance, and an explosion of world trade.

Gold became an unsatisfactory medium of exchange as the world entered the modern age. Cash, banknotes, and cheques were far superior to gold, especially when backed by gold.

It is in the United States where the great gold debate is centred.

America is a gold-loving nation. Gold could well be added to the “three Gs” that kept the Republicans in power in recent times: God, gays, and guns.

Fear of fiat or paper money goes back to the Civil War, when the currency of the Confederacy was rendered worthless, and to the “wildcat banks” that printed their own money and were dubbed “wildcat” because only a wild cat could find them. Gold and silver were preferred.

Indeed, gold has been the best wealth protection scheme for much of the past 3,000 years and might just be a better place to be than in currencies controlled by the cash-in-helicopter-loving Ben Bernanke or Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary who didn’t know about filing taxes.

As gold heads out the window and down the path, with great media attention after years of oblivion when the commodity was barely mentioned in polite society, there are whispers of a bubble.

Was not gold at $US1,000 a year ago?

In the past decade, gold has risen steadily but not dramatically — showing nothing like the drama in the rise and fall of oil and with housing and the tech stocks.

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5p ET Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

In an essay published today at Counterpunch.org, former Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts confirms that the U.S. government has been leasing gold to suppress its price and support the dollar. The admission is made in the last paragraph of the essay, which is appended.

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer

The American economy has gone away. It is not coming back until free trade myths are buried 6 feet under.

America’s 20th century economic success was based on two things. Free trade was not one of them. America’s economic success was based on protectionism, which was ensured by the union victory in the Civil War, and on British indebtedness, which destroyed the British pound as world reserve currency. Following World War II, the US dollar took the role as reserve currency, a privilege that allows the US to pay its international bills in its own currency.

World War II and socialism together ensured that the US economy dominated the world at the mid-20th century. The economies of the rest of the world had been destroyed by war or were stifled by socialism [in terms of the priorities of the capitalist growth model: Editors.]

The ascendant position of the US economy caused the US government to be relaxed about giving away American industries, such as textiles, as bribes to other countries for cooperating with America’s cold war and foreign policies. For example, Turkey’s US textile quotas were increased in exchange for overflight rights in the Gulf War, making lost US textile jobs an off-budget war expense.

In contrast, countries such as Japan and Germany used industrial policy to plot their comebacks. By the late 1970s, Japanese auto makers had the once dominant American auto industry on the ropes. The first economic act of the “free market” Reagan administration in 1981 was to put quotas on the import of Japanese cars in order to protect Detroit and the United Auto Workers.

Eamonn Fingleton, Pat Choate, and others have described how negligence in Washington aided and abetted the erosion of America’s economic position. What we didn’t give away, the United States let be taken away while preaching a “free trade” doctrine at which the rest of the world scoffed.

Fortunately, the U.S.’s adversaries at the time, the Soviet Union and China, had unworkable economic systems that posed no threat to America’s diminishing economic prowess.

This furlough from reality ended when Soviet, Chinese, and Indian socialism surrendered around 1990, to be followed shortly thereafter by the rise of the high speed Internet. Suddenly American and other First World corporations discovered that a massive supply of foreign labor was available at practically free wages.

To get Wall Street analysts and shareholder advocacy groups off their backs, and to boost shareholder returns and management bonuses, American corporations began moving their production for American markets offshore. Products that were made in Peoria are now made in China.

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