If there were a monthly award for celebrating the obvious, or one for deceitful propaganda, they well might go to Mark Sobel, U.S. chairman of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum, purportedly a research group that occasionally enables favored people to rub shoulders with central bankers. (People critical of central banking are carefully excluded from OMFIF functions.)
OMFIF published an essay by Sobel deploring the increasing acquisition of gold by central banks and noting that "monetizing" central bank gold reserves -- that is, selling them -- "could generate resources for good use."
In the essay, headlined "Financial Authorities Should Responsibly Sell Their Gold Stocks" --
https://www.omfif.org/2025/07/financial-authorities-should-responsibly-sell-their-gold-stocks/
-- Sobel writes: "Gold no longer has an official role in the international monetary system. It generates no interest, is costly to store, and is less liquid and harder to sell than securities, for example. Even if one argues that holding gold stocks results in an appreciation for the national balance sheet, that is generating no flow of resources to officialdom."
Sobel seems to think that central bankers haven't heard all this before and have no knowledge of history -- that they don't know that their institutions were major sellers of gold a few decades ago.
He doesn't address that selling or its objective -- to drive the ancient and independent form of money out of the world financial system, increasing the power of central banks and the power of one particular country, leaving the world defenseless.
Even more remarkably, Sobel doesn't address why central banks lately have grown enthusiastic about gold -- their fear of continued subservience to the imperial power whose currency they long have accepted for reserve purposes, their fear of becoming subservient to some other potential imperial power seeking to "internationalize" its currency, and their resentment of the market rigging undertaken by an imperial power, rigging long documented by GATA:
https://www.gata.org/node/20925
Why such glaring omissions?
Maybe it's because -- surprise! -- Sobel has spent most of his life as an employee of the U.S. Treasury Department, during which he was manager of the department's Exchange Stabilization Fund, a primary instrument of market rigging by the U.S. government. Indeed, keeping the world enslaved to the U.S. dollar has been the great purpose of Sobel's career:
https://www.csis.org/people/mark-sobel
Not surprisingly, Sobel's essay and the biographical tagline appended to it by OMFIF make no reference to his background. OMFIF would have the world believe that the essay is independent expert analysis when it is actually U.S. government propaganda.
Sobel concludes: "If authorities were to responsibly sell gold stocks, it might quickly become evident that frothy headlines about gold and official reserve diversification were built on sand."
Or it might quickly become evident that, without gold reserves, many countries were forfeiting their chance for regaining independence in monetary and international affairs.
As for gold reserves being built on sand, what does Sobel think government currencies have often been built on, and, indeed, what some are built on even now?
GATA would welcome a chance to discuss these issues at a function of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum if the organization ever permits such a discussion. But so far, the organization has refused even to acknowledge GATA's mail.
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