Welcome to Capital Account. JP Morgan said in a court filing that PFG’s subpoena of the bank may be overly burdensome. Will JP Morgan find a way to get out of it? It looks like they could be off the hook for accusations of silver manipulation. The Financial Times reported US regulators are increasingly likely to drop the four year investigation of silver manipulation, failing to find enough evidence. Bart Chilton, CFTC Commissioner, told a Motley Fool reporter that this FT report is premature and inaccurate. We find out what Chris Powell, co-founder and treasurer of the Gold Anti- Trust Action Committee, thinks.
Since 1998 the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee, GATA, has been exposing, opposing, and litigating against collusion meant to control the price and supply of gold and other precious metals. GATA has collected and published dozens of documents showing Western treasury and central bank efforts at intervention in metals markets – interventions that occur both openly, as well as surreptitiously, preventing the proper functioning of a free market in gold. Chris Powell, co–founder and treasurer of GATA and Managing Editor of the Journal Inquirer, has come all the way to our DC studio to give us an update on where GATA is in its efforts.
Also, the Federal Government is auditing the gold stored at the New York Fed. Are those who have been calling for an audit for years satisfied, or does this miss the point? We talk to Chris Powell about what this audit accomplishes, and if it even begins to scratch the surface, no pun intended.
Attempts to manipulate free markets invariably end badly – after all, they are, supposedly, by their very nature, free.
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Over the past few weeks, the exposure of the Libor-rigging scandal has monopolized the headlines of the financial press and inveigled its way onto the front pages of every major news publication in the world through the sheer size and scale of the story.
Something as big as this just CAN’T be hidden from the public.
Only… it can.
It has been. It no doubt still is to a certain extent. I’m not going to go through all of the events of the past few weeks as you are no doubt familiar with them, but [simply understanding how LIBOR works makes for a simple conclusion].
I’m afraid it’s rather obvious. Given that almost half the reported inputs that help establish the Libor rate are discarded immediately, Barclays simply CANNOT have manipulated the Libor rate alone. Period.
Remarks by Chris Powell, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
Standard Chartered’s “Earth’s Resources” Conference
J.W. Marriott Hotel, Hong Kong
Thursday, June 21, 2012
The Henley Group Client Seminar
Club Lusitano, Hong Kong
Thursday, June 21, 2012
Hong Kong Gold Investment Forum
Renaissance Harbour View Hotel, Hong Kong
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
This conference is important because gold long has been money and may again be the best and most important money. Most investment houses don’t understand this; some of the few that do understand it fear to acknowledge it. But far from being a quaint antique, gold is actually the secret knowledge of the financial universe.
Gold is so important that Western central banks — particularly the U.S. Treasury and its Exchange Stabilization Fund, the Federal Reserve, and allied central banks — rig the gold market every day, even hour by hour. Why do they do this?
It’s because gold is a powerful competitive currency that, if allowed to function in a free market, determines the value of other currencies and influences interest rates and the value of government bonds.
There is much academic literature supporting gold’s influence over currencies, interest rates, and government bonds throughout history. Prominent in this literature is the study written by Harvard economics professor Lawrence Summers and University of Michigan economics professor Robert Barsky in the June 1988 edition of the Journal of Political Economy, a study titled “Gibson’s Paradox and the Gold Standard.” As with all the documents I’ll cite today, the Summers and Barsky study is posted at my organization’s Internet site, GATA.org:
Summers went on to become treasury secretary of the United States, so his study of gold’s influence on currencies, interest rates, and bond prices is pretty good authority. The Summers and Barsky study implied that governments could achieve their ideal of low interest rates and strong government bond prices by getting control of the price of gold.
