Market rigging gets too obvious even for Bill Buckler and Jim Grant
By: Chris Powell, Secretary/Treasurer, GATA
GoldSeek.com
Sunday, 1 April 2012
Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
Nothing has been more disappointing and frustrating to GATA in its nearly 13 years of fighting gold and silver market manipulation than the refusal to acknowledge the issue by many of those who have affected to be devoted friends of the monetary metals and free markets.
GATA Chairman Bill Murphy long has called this the Not Invented Here Syndrome, a matter of the intellectual vanity of prima donnas who can’t bring themselves to admit that mere upstarts might discover anything profound in the prima donnas’ field. From 45 years in journalism the experience of your secretary/treasurer is that most endeavors are full of people whose success has made them so arrogant that they think that nothing could be happening if they don’t know about it already. (While journalism inclines its practitioners to the exactly opposite position — to realize every day how much more they don’t know — it doesn’t necessarily give them the courage to report what they learn.)
So how delightful it is to discover that two people of great prominence in the gold community have come round — one completely, one mostly — even if it has taken a long time.
The first, Bill Buckler, publisher of the weekly financial letter The Privateer (http://www.the-privateer.com), this week headlines his commentary “ALL Markets Are Manipulated.”
Buckler writes: “It is interesting that many of the same people who are now abandoning stock markets because of their ‘volatility’ over the last few years are the same people who become affronted at the slightest mention of the possibility of precious metals price manipulation. A moment’s serious contemplation should make things clear. The precious metals and gold in particular have always been the ‘alternative’ to government promise based on and created out of thin-air money. As such, the precious metals have always been Public Enemy No. 1 as far as the money manipulators are concerned. Anyone who aspires to intervention in an economy and the political power that it gives is and always has been an enemy of gold. As long as there is a central bank manipulating money and interest rates, all markets are manipulated by definition. To imagine that the precious metals would be overlooked is ridiculous.”
To the best of our knowledge Buckler has never mentioned GATA, despite the reams of documentation published over the years and constantly being developed at our Internet site (http://www.gata.org/taxonomy/term/21). But Buckler is to a great extent a technical analyst of markets, and it is especially hard for such people to acknowledge market manipulation because it greatly diminishes the value of their work if it doesn’t make that work utterly meaningless.
The same with Jim Grant, publisher of the Grant’s Interest Rate Observer letter and perhaps the only gold advocate with enough respectability to be frequently invited to speak at respectable forums, like CNBC. Grant may have remained this respectable by refraining from too much pointed criticism of the financial powers.
But interviewed this week on CNBC by Maria Bartiromo, Grant got very pointed indeed. The Federal Reserve, Grant said, “is in the anti-capitalism business. … The Fed ought to get out of the manipulation business. … They ought to forswear the intervention in markets.” Grant strongly implied, for what may have been the first time, that among the markets being manipulated and intervened against is the gold market. The interview is six minutes long and it’s posted at CNBC here:
The Rest…HERE
