Dear Mr. Arends:
Regarding your commentary at MarketWatch today, "What's Up -- Or Down -- With Gold?" --
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/whats-upor-down-with-gold-11616618248
-- I was disappointed that you did not address the constant and even daily but largely surreptitious intervention in the gold market by governments and central banks, which long has been documented by my organization, the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
For example, just this week GATA reported that the Bank of England refuses to answer whether it has resumed leasing gold:
Of course Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan acknowledged to Congress in 1998 that the objective of gold leasing by central banks is to suppress the price of the monetary metal:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/testimony/1998/19980724.htm
GATA reports every month about the gold swaps and leases undertaken surreptitiously by the Bank for International Settlements in its role as gold broker for its member central banks. Our report for February concluded that this intervention in the gold market by the BIS had reached its highest level in history, precisely as the gold price was falling sharply:
In recent weeks the investigative financial journalists Pam and Russ Martens have reported about the huge increase -- hundreds of billions of dollars -- in the money held by the U.S. Treasury's Exchange Stabilization Fund, which since 1934 has been authorized by U.S. law to intervene secretly in the gold market and other markets throughout the world without having to account for it even to Congress:
Would so much money have been transferred to the Exchange Stabilization Fund without some plan to use it?
Surreptitious intervention in the gold market by governments and central banks is longstanding international policy documented and summarized by GATA here:
So we question how anyone can purport to explain the gold price without accounting for intervention by governments and central banks and putting critical questions to them.
Of course I would be glad to help you review the documentation if you ever wanted to address the gold price issue seriously.
With good wishes.
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
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