et sil fallait encore enfoncer le clou , le discours d'ouverture de Chris Powell , secrétaire et trésorier du Gata
Remarks by Chris Powell
Secretary/Treasurer, Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
at Gold Rush 21
Dawson City, Yukon Territory, Canada
Tuesday, August 8, 2005
What are we to do here at Gold Rush 21?
We're here to show you that, far from being a quaint antique, gold
remains central to the world economic system. That is why the gold
coin I hold here, an ordinary British sovereign from about 80 years
ago, is packed into the survival kits of U.S. military pilots --
because at all time and in all circumstances gold is money.
We're also here to show you that, far from being a speculation that
is interesting at best and paranoid at worst, the suppression of the
gold price by Western central banks is a matter of public record.
How does the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee know that central
banks are working with bullion banks and other financial houses to
suppress the price of gold?
We know because of the painstaking research of our consultants --
Reg Howe, James Turk, Andrew Hepburn, Mike Bolser, and Bob Landis.
and others. They have gone through the official reports and the
footnotes of the Bank for International Settlements, the
International Monetary Fund, the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Treasury
Department, central banks and government agencies, mining companies,
and financial houses, and have amassed enormous evidence.
But that's the complicated stuff, and we also know for a very simple
reason.
We know that the central banks and their intermediaries are working
together to suppress the price of gold because time and again they
have TOLD us so.
After all, what was the Washington Agreement of September 1999 if
not a proclamation that the 15 participating central banks were
colluding to regulate the gold price?
Of course in the Washington Agreement the central banks affected to
be SUPPORTING the gold price; they pledged to limit their gold sales
to 400 tonnes per year for five years -- lest, they said, the gold
market be flooded with metal and the gold price collapse, taking
with it the economies of gold-producing countries.
Of course GATA has put a different construction on the Washington
Agreement. We consider it the device by which central bank gold
LOANS are written off as SALES at discounted prices, rather than be
called back and cause a short squeeze in gold.
That is, far from supporting the gold price, the Washington
Agreement was how the central banks kept gold from rising and
prevented the bankruptcy of the financial houses that, at the
invitation of the central banks, eagerly joined the gold carry trade
of the 1990s. In that carry trade gold was, in effect, loaned by the
central banks for next to nothing and sold by the financial houses
to depress its price, strengthen the U.S. dollar, reduce interest
rates, and inflate the price of paper assets, which were purchased
with the proceeds of the gold sales.
But no matter how you want to construe it, the Washington Agreement
was admittedly a co-ordinated action by the central banks to
regulate the gold price. That central banks get together to discuss
and unify their policy toward gold is a matter of ordinary public
record. Anyone who really believes that this collusion is always
benign, in the public interest, and without ulterior motives
shouldn't go even grocery shopping alone.
The Washington Agreement wasn't the first coordinated intervention
of the central banks in regard to gold. It was at least the second
and probably much more belated than that. How do we know?
Because Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan told us. In fact, he
told Congress too. As usual, no one in the financial press seems to
have been paying attention.
But on July 24, 1998, Greenspan told the House Banking Committee:
"Central banks stand ready to lease gold in increasing quantities
should the price rise." He repeated that statement a few days later
to the Senate Agriculture Committee.
Of course, like the central banks that participated in the
Washington Agreement, Greenspan was disguising the true purposes of
the policy he described. He was explaining why he didn't think that
the derivatives market needed federal regulation, and suggested that
central bank gold leasing was a safeguard against a private corner
on the gold market, a safeguard that made derivatives regulation
unnecessary.
GATA maintains that, as with the Washington Agreement, the purposes
of the central banks were the opposite of what Greenspan was
suggesting. Far from working together to prevent a private corner on
the gold market, the central banks were using gold leasing to
maintain a corner on the gold market themselves.
Construe Greenspan's testimony as you will, but there it is again --
central banks admitting that they work together to regulate the
price of gold. And, more than that, Greenspan told Congress, if
inadvertently, that the purpose of gold leasing was not really the
purpose long maintained by the central banks involved in it -- to
extract a little income from a supposedly dead asset -- but rather
to keep the gold price down.
Central bankers aren't the only ones in the gold business who
acknowledge collusion to control the gold price. The biggest hedger
among the gold-mining companies, Barrick Gold, has gone so far as to
confess, in federal court in New Orleans, to participation in this
scheme. Sued along with its bullion bank, J.P. Morgan Chase, by
Blanchard & Co., the New Orleans coin and bullion dealer, Barrick
filed a surprisingly candid motion in court on February 28, 2003.
Barrick moved for dismissal of Blanchard's lawsuit on grounds of
sovereign immunity. That is, Barrick claimed that, in borrowing gold
from central banks through Morgan Chase, Barrick became the agent
for central bank gold policy; that, as the agent of central banks,
the company could not properly be sued without also suing the real
parties in interest, the central banks, as well; and that, since the
central banks, as the agencies of sovereign governments, have
immunity and could not be made party to the Blanchard suit, the suit
should be dismissed.
Fortunately Judge Helen Berrigan dismissed Barrick's motion, and so
Blanchard's lawsuit has gone to the evidence-collecting phase. The
suit is similar to Reg Howe's federal lawsuit, which was brought in
U.S. District Court in Boston, underwritten financially by GATA,
included government defendants, and failed on the very issue of
sovereign immunity -- the issue that is now out of the way so that,
in the Blanchard case, the world yet might get a close look at how
the gold market really works.
Just as the true purpose of gold leasing is to suppress the gold
price rather than earn a little interest on a "dead asset," some
central banks even acknowledge that the only purpose of holding gold
reserves at all now, in the absence of any currency's formal
convertibility, is to rig markets.
Here is the admission made by the Reserve Bank of Australia in its
annual report for 2003:
"Foreign currency reserve assets and gold are held primarily to
support intervention in the foreign exchange market."
All this shows that while the formal convertibility of currencies
into gold has been ended by the articles of the International
Monetary Fund, gold continues in its nature and function as money
and as the independent international currency, the competitor of the
dollar and the euro -- and that central banks recognize as much,
however grudgingly.
Central banks often acknowledge intervention in currency markets --
direct intervention, as with the Bank of Japan's printing yen to buy
dollars and the People's Bank of China's enforcing a fixed exchange
rate with the dollar; and indirect intervention, as by the heavy
purchases by many central banks of U.S. government bonds. Meanwhile
the Federal Reserve intervenes in and supports the U.S. bond and
equity markets every week through the strategic purchase and sale of
U.S. government bonds.
Maybe you've heard the joke about the lawyer who, asked by a
potential client, "How much is 2 and 2?," replied, "How much do you
WANT it to be?" These days that is even more the premise of central
banking than of the practice of law. What do the markets say? What
do you WANT them to say?
Far from being the mechanisms of steady development and democracy we
tout to the developing world, markets now, in the eyes of central
banking, are considered to be usually INEFFICIENT and WRONG. And so
bailouts and interventions and the issuance of price-capping
derivatives have followed constantly on each other's heels so that
no big financial interest might ever suffer the consequences of its
mistakes or venality. National and even world economic objectives
are now set by unelected overlords, gods of the market whose power
is almost completely undemocratic.
Amid all this intervention, why should it be so hard to accept that
central banks might be more involved in the gold market than they
make plain? Indeed, to believe that central banks are NOT deeply
involved in the gold market, one almost has to believe that it is
the ONLY market they are not deeply involved in.
GATA is in the free-market advocacy business, not the investment
advice business. But we can draw a few conclusions.
First, because of gold leasing and the deceptive accounting for it,
central bank gold reserves are far less than what is claimed.
Second, amid worldwide currency debasement, the gold price will be
largely a matter of how much more gold the central banks are ready
to lease and then sell, a matter of how far down the central banks
are willing to run their gold reserves and whether they think they
may need gold again to restore confidence someday when currency
debasement gets out of hand. The evidence of the gold price of the
last few years -- rising steadily despite constant selling or talk
of selling by the central banks -- suggests that the central banks
are attempting a controlled retreat with gold. The increase in
official anti-gold propaganda supports suspicion that the central
banks are running out of golden ammunition.
And third, and most important, far from being Keynes' "barbarous
relic" or a quaint antique, gold remains not just basic to the world
economic system but, in fact, the secret knowledge of the universe --
the substance and mechanism by which everything else financial can
be revealed and measured. If gold ever escapes the distortions that
so laboriously have been imposed on it, we may see how everything we
have considered normal has actually been distorted grotesquely --
may see, to our shock, that, as Kipling wrote in "The Gods of the
Copybook Headings":
"... all is not gold that glitters, and two and two make four."
When that day comes and the real world reasserts itself with a
vengeance, people will need the real thing -- or the real things,
ANYTHING that is real. Kipling foresaw it this way:
... Then the Gods of the Market tumbled,
...... and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew,
... And the hearts of the meanest were humbled
...... and began to believe it was true
... That All is not Gold that Glitters,
...... and Two and Two make Four --
... And the Gods of the Copybook Headings
...... limped up to explain it once more.
... As it will be in the future,
...... it was at the birth of Man --
... There are only four things certain
...... since Social Progress began: --
... That the Dog returns to his Vomit
...... and the Sow returns to her Mire,
... And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger
...... goes wabbling back to the Fire;
... And that after this is accomplished,
...... and the brave new world begins
... When all men are paid for existing
...... and no man must pay for his sins,
... As surely as Water will wet us,
...... as surely as Fire will burn,
... The Gods of the Copybook Headings
...... with terror and slaughter return!
But we don't have to be quite as apocalyptic as Kipling. We still
have some options, and you will hear about them at this conference,
hear about putting gold and silver back to work in monetary roles.
Among others, you'll hear from James Turk, founder of GoldMoney, the
gold depository and electronic payments system, who is, from the
standpoint of the central banks, probably the most dangerous man in
the world.
You'll hear from Hugo Salinas Price about his proposal to
reintroduce silver as circulating currency in Mexico side by side
with the peso.
You'll be able to talk with John Resing of the Producers Gold
Exchange, a plan for giving the physical gold market more influence
against the paper gold market of the commodities exchanges.
And you'll hear ideas for helping GATA grow.
So thanks for coming all this way, and welcome to Gold Rush 21.
quelques un des sites internet du Gata et de ses principaux acteurs :
- Bill Murphy et le métropole café
http://www.lemetropolecafe.com/-Reg Howe et The Golden sextant
http://www.goldensextant.com/- James Turk et Goldmoney
http://goldmoney.com/- Gata org
http://www.gata.org/
Hardinvestor
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Marie 
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