Financial Media Elite Defensively Bash "Useless" Gold / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2019
At least the FinancialTimes now has come clean about its hostility to gold – as well as to freemarkets and elementary journalism.
GoldAnti-Trust Action Committee (GATA) friend Chris Kniel of Orinda,California, sent to the newspaper's chief economic columnist, Martin Wolf, theexcellent summary of gold and silver market manipulation justwritten by gold researcher Ronan Manly.
Wolf replied derisivelyand dismissively: "This is a matter of absolutely no importancewhatsoever. Who cares about the prices of useless metals?"
Stunned by such acounterfactual assertion, Kniel prompted Wolf to elaborate, receiving this fromthe FT columnist: "I mean to dismiss the whole monetary history of gold.It has no significance in the modern world. It is, as Keynes said, a barbarousrelic."
Actually, Keynes' "barbarousrelic" remark was made not about gold itself but about the gold standardfor currencies. Keynes wasn't denying gold's use as money. But that is theleast of the problems with Wolf's reply.
Who cares about theprices of useless metals? "No significance in the modern world"?
For starters, governmentsthemselves care.
That's why central banks,against Wolf's advice, continue to hold huge inventories of gold and latelyhave been increasing them.
It's why central banksclassify gold as a Tier 1 asset, equivalent to government-issue bonds and cash.
It's why central banksconstantly trade the metal and its derivatives surreptitiously, directly andthrough the Bank for International Settlements, usually to restrain the metal'sprice, recognizing that gold is a determinant of currency values, interestrates, and government bond prices.
It's why theInternational Monetary Fund forbids its members from formally linking theircurrencies to gold, lest the metal gain precedence over government-issued currencies.
Further, London is thecenter of the world's gold trading, the bullion banks are major employersthere, and the FT is based in London, so the newspaper itself ordinarily mightcare.
Of course, Wolf'sdismissing "the whole monetary history of gold" doesn't make thathistory disappear. Indeed, today Agence France-Presse distributed a report about gold's monetaryhistory that is both fascinating and tragic, gold's history being a big part ofhuman history.
But Manly's wasn't only about goldand silver. It was also about largely secret market rigging by government, andthe Financial Times says it's in the business of reporting about markets.
So is market rigging bygovernment of no concern to Wolf as well? Since such market rigging is now sopervasive – for years now there have really been no markets anymore, justcentral bank interventions – why does any reader need someone of Wolf's viewsof journalism?
And if Wolf'sindifference to both history and market rigging really represents the FinancialTimes (FT), what does anyone need the newspaper for, except possiblydisinformation?
For years, GATA has beensupplying FT journalists with documentation of surreptitious intervention inthe gold market by governments and central banks. At least twice yoursecretary/treasurer has delivered such documentation to FT staffers face to facein London – in 2011 to the journalist who is now chairman of the newspaper'seditorial board and U.S. editor at large, Gillian Tett, and in 2017 to FTreporter Thomas Hale.
Tett took enough noticeto mention GATA in a columnin the newspaper without ever pursuing the issue of market manipulation and without ever puttinga critical question to a central bank.
Hale listened politelyfor 45 minutes, asking a few questions, perhaps not realizing that the FT wouldnever permit him to commit journalism with this issue. Maybe Wolf himself toldHale that market rigging by governments doesn't matter or at least must not berevealed.
But in fairness to theFT, GATA long has been providing the same documentation to many othermainstream financial news organizations around the world with not much moresatisfactory results, though a major story might be gained just by asking theU.S. Federal Reserve and Treasury Departments to specify the markets in whichthey are secretly trading and why, and then reporting their refusals to answer,and then by asking the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission whether it hasjurisdiction over secret manipulative trading by the U.S. government or itsagents or if such trading is legal.
For more than a year,those agencies have refused to answer those questions for a member ofCongress.
Also in fairness to theFT, most monetary metals mining companies don't care, or pretend not to care,about the suppression of the prices of their products.
But then mining companiesare terribly vulnerable to governments for their mining permits, royaltyrequirements, and enforcement of environmental regulations, and to theirbankers, most of whom are formally government agents in financial markets.
By contrast newsorganizations in the West and in some places in the East are free, at leastnominally. So what are they afraid of? What is the FT afraid of? What is Wolfafraid of?
Do they fear not gettinginvited to the Bank of England's Christmas party? Or is it the revelation thatthe conventional wisdom on which Wolf bases his pontification is a bit off?
By ChrisPowell,
Chris Powell is a political columnist and former managingeditor at the Journal Inquirer, a daily newspaper in Manchester, Connecticut,USA, where he has worked since graduating from high school in 1967. His columnis published in newspapers throughout Connecticut. He is alsosecretary/treasurer of the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc., (GATA) whichhe co-founded in 1999 to expose and oppose the rigging of the gold market byWestern central banks and their investment bank agents.
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