‘Gold bugs’ aren’t the great concealers; central banks and financial journalists are
By: Chris Powell, Secretary/Treasurer, GATA
GoldSeek.com
Monday, 12 October 2015
MarketWatch columnist Brett Arends may win this year’s award for the most disinformation in financial commentary about gold. His October 9 column, “Here’s the Chart Gold Bugs Don’t Want You to See” —
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/heres-the-chart-gold-bugs-dont-want-you…
— is misleading from top to bottom.
In the first place, while the gold business has its share of dishonorable people, the gold business is small and its dishonorable people are outnumbered a thousand to one by dishonorable people in government, central banking, and the stock, bond, and real estate businesses. And whatever a few “gold bugs” are hiding from the markets, it is trivial compared to what investment banks and central banks are hiding, about which Arends has yet to show any curiosity.
Arends displays a long-term chart of the price of silver in dollars to argue that silver has not done well since the U.S. government “stopped treating silver as money all the way back in 1873.” That’s incorrect. While the U.S. government ended free coinage of silver in 1873, it continued to issue silver certificates — paper currency redeemable in silver — until 1964 and to issue silver coins as general currency until 1965.
No one will dispute Arends’ assertion that silver isn’t worth as much today in real terms as it was in the days of free coinage, but here is something else in which Arends demonstrates no interest — the U.S. government’s determination to suppress silver’s price since its demonetization by the Coinage Act of 1965. Signing the act, President Johnson himself proclaimed a policy of silver price suppression.
“If anybody has any idea of hoarding our silver coins,” the president said, “let me say this. Treasury has a lot of silver on hand, and it can be and it will be used to keep the price of silver in line with its value in our present silver coin. There will be no profit in holding them out of circulation for the value of their silver content.”
The Rest…HERE
