Gold: Chris Marcus of Arcadia Economics has assembled a compelling list of questions about what seems like the indifference of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission to misconduct and manipulation in the silver market, which the commission is supposed to regulate.
Marcus is undertaking to raise $100,000 via GoFundMe.com to be donated to a charitable cause if the commission answers his questions, or possibly to be used to sue the commission if it refuses to answer.
Of course the CFTC isn't likely to answer any important questions about misconduct and manipulation in the monetary metals market, in light o f the overarching question it has repeatedly refused to answer for GATA and for U.S. Rep. Alex X. Mooney, R-West Virginia:
gata.org
That is, does the commission have jurisdiction over manipulative trading undertaken by or at the behest of the U.S. government or governments trading with the approval of the U.S. government?
Indeed, the architecture for manipulative trading for or with the authorization of the U.S. government long has been in place in plain view, just not widely understood. They are:
-- The U.S. Treasury Department's Exchange Stabilization Fund, which is authorized to manipulate and rig not only all markets in the United States but all markets in the world, quite without the approval of the governments with direct responsibility for those markets:
home.treasury.gov
-- The Bank for International Settlements, which functions as a broker for its member central banks, whose admitted purposes include ""the provision of international credits and joint efforts to influence asset prices (especially gold and foreign exchange) in circumstances where this might be thought useful," and which even advertises as being among its services its secret interventions in the gold and currency markets:
gata.org
gata.org
-- The Central Bank Incentive Program maintained by the CME Group, operator of the major U.S. futures exchanges, which offers governments and central banks volume trading discounts for secretly trading all U.S. futures contracts through exchange-approved brokers:
gata.org
Marcus wonders, as many do, why the CFTC continues to allow JPMorganChase & Co. to trade in U.S. futures markets when the bank has been described by the U.S. Justice Department as a criminal enterprise, its brokers have confessed to market manipulation, and t he bank recently was fined $920 million for manipulating the gold, silver, and U.S. Treasury futures markets:
gata.org
An obvious answer is available: that the bank is trading for the U.S. government or other governments with the authorization of the U.S. government.
After all, a few years ago both JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon and the bank's commodity desk chief, Blythe Masters, said the bank had no proprietary position in the monetary metals markets and traded them only for "clients":
gata.org
Unfortunately no mainstream financial news organization asked the bank whether the clients for whom it was trading those markets included the U.S. government or governments intervening in those markets with the approval of the U.S. government.
GATA put that question to the bank but predictably enough was not answered.
Many years ago GATA engaged a major U.S. antitrust law firm to su e the U.S. government for rigging the gold market. After researching the law, the firm advised GATA against suing, on the grounds that market rigging by the U.S. government was fully authorized by the Gold Reserve Act of 1934 as amended since then.
But in a lawsuit underwritten by GATA in U.S. District Court in Boston in 2001, Harvard-trained lawyer and gold advocate Reginald Howe sued the Bank for International Settlements, the U.S. Treasury, the U.S. Federal Reserve, and various bullion banks for manipulating the gold market. In the single public hearing in that case, an assistant U.S. attorney moved for dismissal of the lawsuit on the grounds that the U.S. government indeed was authorized by the Gold Reserve Act of 1934 to rig the gold market as the lawsuit complained. The lawsuit was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds instead:
gata.org
In 2008 GATA sued the Federal Reserve for access to its gold records. The Fed refused to make most of t hem accessible but during the Fed's internal adjudication procedure, a member of the Fed's Board of Governors acknowledged that the Fed had secret gold swap arrangements with foreign banks and would not disclose them:
gata.org
GATA subsequently won the lawsuit, but only insofar as the court found that a single document was illegally withheld by the Fed, the rest being exempt from disclosure. Obviously the U.S. government has a lot of market rigging to hide.
The legality of that market rigging answers most of Marcus' questions. Indeed, as the great U.S. journalist Charles Peters often wrote during his editorship of The Washington Monthly, the scandal is not what is illegal but rather what is perfectly legal.
For governments figured out what they needed to do to subvert and defeat strategic markets long before GATA, Marcus, and others realized that something was wrong.
Nevertheless, Marcus' questions remai n compelling and may lead others to pursue the market-rigging issue with their members of Congress, their brokers, their monetary metals mining companies, and mainstream financial journalists and analysts.
So please watch Marcus' video itemizing his questions --
youtube.com
-- and consider contributing to his project:
gofundme.com
Chris Powell, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
CPowell@GATA.org |
