Smoking Guns & Monetary Power

By Adrian Ash, GoldSeek

“The transcending value seen in the Dollar has lost its foundation…”

A SHORT SERIES of secret memos, published and dissected at ZeroHedge, provide the “smoking gun” of gold-market manipulation. Apparently.

And given this little slew of dusty archive-digging – throwing up three documents from 1968 to 1975, each one declassified within thirty years – then ”If over 40 years ago the Fed and the members of the gold ‘Pool’ were openly intervening in the gold market, one can only imagine what the situation is now…”

Go on, just imagine. Because imagination is what you’ll need if you’re going to nail type-written notes from before the Moon Landings as primary, original-source evidence that the United States’ official gold reserves – variously sold, lent, swapped or simply given away since the early 1990s – have been mobilized to suppress prices, pushing gold down from $250 an ounce a decade ago to, ummm, more than $1000 today.

These memos fret about shrinking gold reserves and the world’s gold-driven money supply…Britain’s failed deflation policy of the late ’60s…whether South Africa will sell its new mine supply on the open market…German border taxes…and the “gold-like” qualities of the proposed Special Drawing Right (SDR). Such prehistory matters, yes. But it’s a world away from demonstrating what newcomers to gold today may mistake for good cause to steer clear.

The little history these scattered notes sketch does echo today, however faintly. Are central banks buying gold at market prices – then France, now Beijing through via its domestic gold output? How to replace the abiding monetary standard – then gold, now the Dollar? And like the Fed memos reviewed on blogs elsewherethis year, the notes republished by ZeroHedge certainly prove one thing, at least:

Just how awkward gold became long before the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary system. Bluntly put, it was a pain in the arse – and not only for Washington.

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