"Let's be honest about gold," read the headline in The Wall
Street Journal on Jason Zweig's column July 17. "It's a pet rock":
http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2015/07/17/let...ut-gold-its-...
Zweig wrote: "It is time to call owning gold what it is: an act of
faith."
And yet, as gold researcher and GATA consultant Ronan Manly pointed out
today in a note to your secretary/treasurer, authorities even higher than The
Wall Street Journal seem to have a different opinion.
Manly, who is always examining documentation about gold rather than merely
pontificating about it as mainstream financial journalists do, called
attention to contrary assertions on the Internet site of London Precious Metals
Clearing Ltd. --
http://www.lpmcl.com/
-- which manages the over-the-counter gold market in London, the largest
in the world (at least for the time being).
In the "About Clearing" section of its Internet site, London
Precious Metals Clearing Ltd. says:
"The six London bullion clearing members each maintain confidential
secure vaulting facilities within central London locations, using either
their own premises or those of a secure storage agent, which are used to
process and store precious metals (mostly gold and silver), for both the
member and those clients who require custodial storage, (including some
central banks). ...
"[T]hese vaulting facilities enable the depositories to process large
physical transactions with a high degree of confidentiality (essential given
the sensitivity many governments and central banks place on gold
transactions); also, these vaults provide the potential of some modest income
from client storage requirements.
"There are close ties between the vault operations and the precious
metal trading and sales team on physical movements, particularly when
scheduling consignment stock deliveries, but also where key government or
central bank physical transactions are being undertaken, which require
sensitive and confidential handling, and often involve taking high-security
precautions."
The clearing association's assertions raise a couple of questions:
1) Why are central banks and governments so sensitive and secretive about
what are supposedly only pet rocks?
2) Are there any circumstances under which Zweig and The Wall Street
Journal (and, for that matter, the rest of the mainstream financial news
media) would tell the truth about gold?
Though readers of these dispatches must be tiring of hearing it, still it
must be said and may have to be said for decades to come:
No analysis of the gold market is worth anything if it fails to address
these questions:
-- Are central banks in the gold market surreptitiously or not?
-- If central banks are in the gold market surreptitiously, is it
just for fun -- for example, to see which central bank's trading desk can
make the most money by cheating the most investors -- or is it for policy
purposes?
-- If central banks are in the gold market for policy purposes, are
these the traditional purposes of defeating a potentially competitive world
reserve currency, or have these purposes expanded?
-- If central banks, creators of infinite money, are
surreptitiously trading a market, how can it be considered a market at all,
and how can any country or the world ever enjoy a market economy again?
Documentation responsive to these questions can be found here --
http://www.gata.org/node/14839
-- but of course not yet in Zweig's column or elsewhere in The Wall Street
Journal, though the documentation has been delivered to the newspaper many
times over many years, once even in person by your secretary/treasurer by
appointment at the paper's headquarters in New York. A few years before that,
GATA even spent $264,000 to place a full-page advertisement in the newspaper
to alert it and the nation to the rigging of the gold market:
http://www.gata.org/node/wallstreetjournal
(Boy, would your secretary/treasurer like to have that money back.)
So The Wall Street Journal knows very well what's going on. Ironically the
American newspaper that most purports to advocate free markets is a crucial
accomplice to their subversion.
