In pursuit of democracy,
limited and accountable government, and free and transparent markets, GATA is
up against central banks, the most powerful institutions on the planet. But
they are not so much the problem, as their power is based largely on surreptitiousness
and it will crumble when it is exposed.
The bigger problem is the
willful ignorance and arrogance of the financial news media, spectacularly
demonstrated yesterday by Joe Weisenthal in his
commentary at Business Insider, "The Price of Gold Doesn't Matter."
Weisenthal writes:
"It's true that gold
has had a great run over the past several years, but here's the real
question: Who cares?
"Is the average person who has to buy bread or milk, go to the doctor,
and pay rent affected by the doubling of gold?
"Other than gold
traders and jewelery makers and the small slice of
industry that uses gold for industrial purposes, the price of gold doesn't
matter to anyone.
"What matters to
people is the cost of real stuff, and in recent
years that's been pretty subdued."
Weisenthal then cites official consumer
price indexes, as if even the "average person" whose price taking Weisenthal affects to be so concerned about gives them
any credence anymore and as if those indexes aren't as manipulated by
governments as the financial markets themselves.
But if no one cares about
the price of gold, why are central banks so involved in the gold market and
so damned secretive about it?
Why do central banks
conceal their gold swaps and leases and consider information about those
things fatally "market sensitive"?
http://www.gata.org/node/12016
Indeed, why do central
banks conceal nearly everything about their involvement with gold?:
http://www.gata.org/node/9917
http://www.gata.org/node/11661
Why does the U.S.
government have an agency created specifically to intervene secretly in the
gold market and all other markets?:
http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/international/ESF/Pages/esf-inde...
Why does the Bank for
International Settlements, the central bank of central banks, even advertise
secret gold market interventions among its services to its members?:
http://www.gata.org/node/11012
Why is the BIS trading
gold, gold futures, and options on behalf of its member central banks?:
http://www.gata.org/node/11257
http://www.gata.org/node/11622
http://www.gata.org/node/11990
http://www.gata.org/node/11502
Why have so many central
bankers admitted that their policy has been to suppress the gold price?:
http://www.gata.org/node/10909
http://www.gata.org/node/11304
Why have so many central
banks started to buy gold?:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2013/03/27/central-banks-bough...
Could all this be
happening because gold is a currency that competes with the currencies issued
by central banks, that gold has been recognized by central bankers and
leading economists as a determinant of currency values, interest rates, and
government bond prices --
http://www.gata.org/node/1373
-- and
because central banks want to prevent an exodus from their currencies to
gold?
In any case, has Weisenthal ever tried putting a single question to
central banks about their involvement in the gold market? Has Weisenthal made any demand or brought any litigation
against central banks under freedom-of-information law? Has he ever sought
information about gold from an original source here? Or does Weisenthal just follow the implicit motto of all
financial journalism these days: "I think -- therefore I know"?
Of course Weisenthal doesn't know; worse, he even presumes not to
have to ask.
Mark Twain knew all about
Weisenthal's type of journalist back in 1870 when
he wrote his satirical short story "How I Edited an Agricultural
Paper," acknowledging that he knew no more about agriculture than Weisenthal knows about finance and the economy. Twain's
story can be found here --
http://www.americanliterature.com/author/mark-twain/short-story/how-i-ed...
-- but
its conclusion, virtually a portrait of Weisenthal
and his colleagues in financial journalism, is not to be missed.
The agricultural
newspaper's editor, returning from vacation to find that Twain, as substitute
editor, has discredited the paper by publishing ridiculous falsehoods, wails:
"Oh, why didn't you tell me you didn't know anything about
agriculture?"
Twain replies cynically
and contemptuously:
"Tell you, you
cornstalk, you cabbage, you son of a cauliflower? It's the first time I ever
heard such an unfeeling remark.
"I tell you I have
been in the editorial business going on 14 years, and it is the first time I
ever heard of a man's having to know anything in order to edit a newspaper.
"You turnip! Who
write the dramatic critiques for the second-rate papers? Why, a parcel of
promoted shoemakers and apprentice apothecaries, who know just as much about
good acting as I do about good farming and no more.
"Who review the
books? People who never wrote one.
"Who do up the heavy
leaders on finance? Parties who have had the largest opportunities for
knowing nothing about it.
"Who criticise the Indian campaigns? Gentlemen who do not know a warwhoop from a wigwam, and
who never have had to run a foot-race with a tomahawk or pluck arrows
out of the several members of their families to build the evening campfire
with.
"Who write the
temperance appeals, and clamor about the flowing bowl? Folks who will never
draw another sober breath till they do it in the grave.
"Who edit the
agricultural papers, you ... yam? Men, as a general thing, who fail in the
poetry line, yellow-colored novel line, sensation drama line, city editor
line, and finally fall back on agriculture as a temporary reprieve from the
poorhouse.
"You try to tell me
anything about the newspaper business? Sir, I have been through it from Alpha
to Omaha, and I tell you that the less a man knows, the bigger the noise he
makes and the higher the salary he commands.
"Heaven knows if I
had but been ignorant instead of cultivated, and impudent instead of
diffident, I could have made a name for myself in this cold, selfish world.
"I take my leave,
Sir. Since I have been treated as you have treated me, I am perfectly willing
to go. But I have done my duty. I have fulfilled my contract as far as I was
permitted to do it. I said I could make your paper of interest to all classes
-- and I have. I said I could run your circulation up to 20,000 copies, and
if I had had two more weeks I'd have done it. And I'd have given you the best
class of readers that ever an agricultural paper had -- not a farmer in it,
nor a solitary individual who could tell a watermelon tree from a peach vine
to save his life. You are the loser by this rupture, not me, Pie-plant.
Adios."
"I then left."
Weisenthal's commentary, a classic of the
willful ignorance of financial journalism, is posted at Business Insider
here:
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-price-of-gold-is-pointless-2013-3
