C'est une superbe synthèse que je vous recommande chaleureusement de lire et de faire lire... Chris Powell: Gold and silver market manipulation update

Submitted by
cpowell on 10:28AM ET Friday, November 14, 2008. Section: Daily
Dispatches
Remarks by Chris Powell, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action
Committee Inc.
New Orleans Investment Conference
New Orleans Marriott
Hotel
Thursday, November 13, 2008
A year ago it was still a struggle to persuade some people that the gold and
silver markets were being manipulated by Western central banks. Now, after
months of financial turmoil around the world and constant central bank
intervention in the markets, to believe that the gold and silver markets are
not being manipulated by central banks you have to believe that those
markets are the only markets not being so manipulated.
Why are the gold and silver markets manipulated by governments and the
financial houses that serve as their agents? Because gold and silver are
competitive currencies and because their value greatly influences interest
rates, which ordinarily governments like to keep low.
Last year at this conference I reviewed in detail the official documentations
and admissions of the gold price suppression scheme. Those documentations and
admissions remain posted at GATA's Internet site. Today I'd like to review some
evidence that has turned up more recently, as well as some related
developments.
Maybe most interesting have been the studies of the U.S. Commodity Futures
Trading Commission market reports done by silver market analyst Ted Butler and
by Gene Arensberg, a market analyst for ResourceInvestor.com. Butler and
Arensberg reported that as of August just two banks held more than 60 percent of
the short positions in silver on the New York Commodities Exchange. This was an
unprecedented and seemingly illegal concentrated short position, and it implied
that the smashing down of silver was very much a manipulation by one or two very
rich and powerful market participants, a destruction of the free market.
Complaints about this concentrated short position prompted the CFTC to undertake
still another investigation of the silver market, this time by a different
division of the commission, its enforcement division. Further, CFTC Commissioner
Bart Chilton has told GATA that the agency is investigating the gold market as
well.
This week Arensberg found that the CFTC's latest report shows that just three
or fewer banks now hold half the short positions in gold on the Comex and more
than 80 percent of the silver short positions.
Also this week Butler obtained a copy of a letter from the CFTC to U.S. Rep.
Gary G. Miller, R-California, that sought to explain the concentrated short
position in silver. The CFTC's letter implied that this extreme short position
resulted from JPMorganChase's acquisition of Bear Stearns in March. If we
construe the CFTC's letter correctly, that would make MorganChase the big short
in silver now and imply that, in financially underwriting MorganChase's
acquisition of Bear Stearns, the Federal Reserve was also underwriting
MorganChase's assumption of that short position in silver.
Of course MorganChase was also the bullion banker to Barrick Gold, the
biggest gold shorter over the last decade. In 2003 Barrick told U.S. District
Court Judge Helen Berrigan right here in New Orleans that, in shorting gold,
Barrick had become the agent of the central banks in regulating the gold market
and thus should share their sovereign immunity against lawsuits.
MorganChase is also the world's biggest issuer of interest-rate derivatives,
instruments by which interest rates are suppressed.
All this causes GATA to believe that MorganChase is in effect an agency of
the U.S. government, or rather, perhaps, that the U.S. government is an agency
of MorganChase. In any case, MorganChase has had an intimate relationship with
the U.S. government since the days of J. Pierpont Morgan himself.
Incidentally, Jean Strouse's 1999 biography of Morgan, which won the Bancroft
Prize for American History and Diplomacy, recounts that Morgan's first big
triumph in finance was to corner the gold market in New York in 1863 during the
Civil War. Nearly 150 years later there really may be nothing new under the
sun.
Also lately raising suspicion about surreptitious government intervention in
the precious metals markets has been the refusal of the Federal Reserve and the
Treasury Department to release to GATA hundreds of pages of government documents
about the disposition of the U.S. gold reserve. The Fed has told GATA's lawyers
that the documents are being withheld in part because their release might
compromise information that is proprietary to private companies. Why anything
about the U.S. gold reserve should be considered proprietary to anyone is beyond
those of us at GATA -- unless, of course, the reserve is being used to
manipulate markets surreptitiously.
But we at GATA do not feel picked on by the Fed and the Treasury. For the Fed
and the Treasury seem to be treating everybody as if the disposition of public
assets is nobody's business but Wall Street's. This week Bloomberg News Service
reported that the Federal Reserve is refusing to disclose how much it has lent
to particular banks and exactly what sort of collateral the Fed has accepted for
those loans, which have reached hundreds of billions of dollars. For example, is
the Fed valuing the same kind of collateral from different borrowers the same
way, and lending against it at the same rate? Or is the Fed giving advantages to
certain borrowers and not others, depending on their political influence and
straitened circumstances? That is, are the Fed and the Treasury Department now
being operated as the greatest patronage and market-rigging schemes in history?
The government is concealing the evidence.
Since we last gathered here in New Orleans many of us been cowering under the
prospect of more official-sector gold sales, particularly gold sales by the
International Monetary Fund, which has approved a plan of selling gold to raise
cash to replace the income it is no longer getting from interest on loans to
developing countries. But despite more than a year of loud talk about it, the
IMF has not sold any gold yet, and GATA suspects that the IMF really does not
have the 3,200 tonnes it says it has, only a tenuous claim on the gold reserves
of its member nations, particularly the United States, which has a veto on any
IMF gold sales and has not approved any yet.

Back in April I tried to engage the IMF in a dialogue about its gold and I
had an exchange by e-mail with an IMF publicist, Conny Lotze.
My first question was: "Your Internet site says the IMF holds 3,217 metric
tons of gold 'at designated depositories.' Which depositories are these?"
Conny Lotze of the IMF replied, but not specifically. She wrote: "The fund's
gold is distributed across a number of official depositories," adding that the
IMF's rules designate the United States, Britain, France, and India as
depositories.
My second question was: "If you'd prefer not to identify the depositories for
security reasons, could you at least identify the national and private
custodians of the IMF's gold and the amounts of IMF gold held by each?"
Conny Lotze replied, again incompletely: "All of the designated depositories
are official."
My third question was: "Is the IMF's gold at these depositories allocated --
that is, specifically identified as belonging to the IMF -- or is it merged with
other gold in storage at these depositories?"
Conny Lotze replied, still not very specifically: "The fund's gold is
properly accounted for at all its depositories."
My fourth question was: "Do the IMF's member countries count the IMF's gold
as part of their own national reserves, or do they count and identify the IMF's
gold separately?"
Conny Lotze replied a bit ambiguously: "Members do not include IMF gold
within their reserves because it is an asset of the IMF. Members include their
reserve position in the fund [the IMF] in their international reserves."
This sounded to me as if the IMF members are still counting as their own the
gold that supposedly belongs to the IMF -- that the IMF members are just listing
the gold assets in another column on their own books.
My fifth question was: "Does the IMF have assurances from the depositories
that its gold is not leased or swapped or otherwise encumbered? If so, what are
these assurances?"
Conny Lotze replied: "Under the fund's Articles of Agreement it is not
authorized to engage in these transactions in gold."
But I had not asked if the IMF itself was swapping or leasing gold. I
had asked whether the custodians of the IMF's gold were swapping or
leasing it.
This prompted me to raise one more question for Conny Lotze. I wrote her: "Is
there any audit of the IMF's gold that is available to the public? I ask
because, if the amount of IMF gold held by each depository nation is not public
information, there doesn't seem to be much documentation for the IMF's gold, nor
any documentation for the assurance that its custody is just fine. Without any
details or documentation, the IMF's answer seems to be simply that it should be
trusted -- that it has the gold it says it has, somewhere."
And Conny Lotze ... well, she never wrote back to me again. After all, I had
uttered the dirtiest word in government service: A-U-D-I-T.
That the International Monetary Fund refuses to account for the gold it
claims to have should be potential news for the financial media. It would be
nice if the financial media pursued that issue before their next attempt to
scare the gold market with stories about IMF gold sales.
But even if such sales by the IMF should be undertaken, they might not be
much for gold investors to worry about. For a month ago I happened to attend in
New York City the annual fall dinner of the Committee for Monetary Research and
Education, and it had an unscheduled speaker, Columbia University Professor
Robert Mundell, who, as you may recall, won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1999
and is regarded as the father of the euro. Through great luck I got to sit next
to Mundell on the platform and so heard him clearly as he went out of his way to
join the discussion of my topic, gold. Mundell remarked that if the IMF sold any
gold, China should buy all of it to diversify its foreign exchange reserves.
Since Mundell is a consultant to the Chinese government, the Chinese government
surely heard this advice from him long before the CMRE meeting did.
You can do a lot of market rigging when you can print legal tender to
infinity, pass out huge amounts of it to your friends, and induce them to use
derivatives to siphon speculative demand for real stuff away from actual
possession of that real stuff. But in the end printing legal tender and
contriving promises to deliver real stuff don't produce real stuff. With
infinite legal tender and derivatives you can push the futures price of a
commodity below its production costs and below its free-market price for a
while, but you risk causing shortages. And of course that's what we have in gold
and silver right now -- falling prices for the paper promises of metal even as
little real metal is to be had and the spread between the futures price and the
real price grows. Last night a GATA supporter in Bangkok, Thailand, who long has
been in the silver business e-mailed me that real silver there is prices at $18
per ounce for orders of 1 kilo or more and $23 per ounce for smaller or ders.
Our friend in Bangkok added that when he shows silver dealers there the New York
silver futures price on the Internet, they laugh at him. Shortages can have
various causes but generally they are their own cure. When shortages persist,
they well may result from government intervention in markets.
Of course prices always have been determined to a great extent by the volume
and velocity of money and credit, and so the creation of money and credit is,
all by itself, inevitably an intervention into markets. But lately money and
credit have been disappearing and reappearing in a flash in the billions and
trillions. How can so much come and go so quickly? Maybe because what passes for
money and credit today is a bit too ephemeral, having little connection to
reality and a lot of connection to politics.
That is why market advice today is more doubtful than ever: Markets have
become more politicized than ever. Supply and demand and profitability are no
longer the primary determinants of markets. No, the primary determinant of
markets is now politics: Which countries will cut interest rates the
most? Which countries will subsidize their banks and corporations the most?
Which countries will get IMF and World Bank loans? Which countries will be given
unlimited currency swap lines and which won't? Which companies will get bailed
out and which won't? How much more dishoarding of gold will central banks do to
keep the price down, and which central banks? When will central banks run out of
gold or decide to stop spending it this way? Most importantly, when will the
world decide to stop financing the wild irresponsibility of the United States by
lending the U.S. money that can never be repaid?
These are all political questions, and only political decisions will answer
them. Some of these questions may be answered as soon as this weekend at the
international conference in Washington. Answers to some of the other questions
probably will be conveyed in advance to certain insiders -- like the financial
houses that serve as the market agents of the central banks -- and those
insiders will get richer. As good as this conference is, you will not be hearing
from any of those insiders here.
But we may gain some confidence from politics too, since we know that
governments are no longer shy about intervening in the markets and since central
banking was invented precisely to inflate, to avert debt deflation, to devalue
the currency when that is deemed necessary or convenient by those in power --
which is most of the time. We know that the world is now drowning in debt, and
in a research paper published in May 2006 a British economist, Peter W. Millar
-- founder of Valu-Trac Research in London, formerly an executive with the Abu
Dhabi Investment Authority -- forecast that to avert debt deflation and to
increase the value of their monetary reserves, central banks would need to
increase the value of gold by at least 700 percent and maybe by as much as 2,000
percent. This could be done easily, for to increase the value of their monetary
reserves central banks need only to stop selling and leasing gold and to stop
subsidizing the sale of gold derivatives by their ag ents, the financial houses.
Revalued high enough, gold could cover all government debts and let the world
start over again.
Millar kindly has given GATA permission to post his research paper at our
Internet site, and you can find it here:
http://www.gata.org/files/PeterMillarGoldNoteMay06.pdf
When Millar made his forecast about such an upward revaluation of gold -- 2
1/2 years ago -- gold had just reached $700 per ounce, not far from where it is
now. Multiplied by 700 percent, that would mean a gold price of about $5,000 per
ounce. Multiplied by 2,000 percent ... well, if that happens, we may be able to
afford to hire someone to do the math for us -- if, of course, those of us who
do not live in free countries like China and Russia are allowed to keep our
gold. But that is still another political question.

* * *
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Richard Russell: I'm starting to think gold is manipulated

Submitted by
cpowell on 02:00PM ET Friday, November 14, 2008. Section: Daily
Dispatches
3:53p CT Friday, November 14, 2008
Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
A subscriber to Richard Russell's Dow Theory Letter who is a longtime
participant in GATA sends the excerpt that is below from Russell's letter
Thursday night. Our friend headlines the excerpt, "That Didn't Take Long." And
yet Russell still got there sooner than some other worthies.
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee
Inc.
* * *
From Dow Theory Letter
by Richar Russell
Thursday, November 13,
2008
I've never been a big fan of the "gold is being manipulated" thesis. However,
I'm now giving the manipulation thesis second thoughts.
Most of the world's central banks are now in the process of fighting
recession and deflation. This requires government spending and the production of
enormous quantities of new fiat money. The last thing the central banks want is
for the public to realize what they are doing.
Normally, surging gold would be the signal for the public to ask questions --
rising gold is a red flag for the fiat money creators.
It's amazing and beyond coincidence the way gold rallies and then immediately
is hammered down below $740. I know that there are huge short positions in gold
on the COMEX. I'm no longer a skeptic on the "gold is being manipulated" claim.
Somebody is selling gold every time gold rallies toward a breakout above $870,
or more properly gold at $840.
I don't think the manipulators (if there are such people) can keep it
up.

* * *
Help Keep GATA Going
GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United
States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail
dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at http://www.gata.org/.

pour les nouveaux et ou ceux qui ne comprennent toujours pas pourquoi ces marchés seraient manipulés...( je vois avec stupéfaction que les objectifs évidents de cette manip restent mystérieux ....)

une excellente interview de Murphy parue dans the daily bell

http://www.thedailybell.com/bellPage.asp?nid=399&fl=