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CPM Group's Jeff Christian battles straw men to distract from the big issues of gold
10:22p ET Tuesday, April 23, 2024
Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
Jeffrey Christian, managing director of metals consultancy CPM Group, today spent 16 minutes on YouTube raising and knocking down some straw men to give his viewers the misleading impression that there is nothing to be doubted about the U.S. government's involvement with the gold market.
Christian challenged long-made but usually anonymous assertions that the U.S. gold reserve at Fort Knox, Kentucky, is gone or missing in large part. He notes that there are official audits asserting that all the gold is where it should be. Those who cast doubt on the integrity of the audits, Christian says, are "scum."
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But contrary to Christian's suggestion, the big question about U.S. gold reserve is not the narrow one of whether there's still metal at Fort Knox but whether the U.S. government has foreign gold obligations and whether these obligations are so large that U.S. gold reserves at Fort Knox and elsewhere are potentially impaired by multiple claims of ownership.
In this respect the curiosity of a more candid and honest analyst might be piqued by the recent refusal of the Federal Reserve to answer even for a member of Congress whether foreign nations have been repatriating their gold that nominally has been vaulted at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York:
The amount of foreign gold vaulted at the New York Fed used to be reported publicly by the Fed at various intervals. Why is it apparently a top secret matter now? Christian doesn't seem to mind.
A more candid and honest analyst also might wonder aloud why the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission repeatedly has refused to answer, even for a member of Congress, whether the commission has jurisdiction over manipulative trading in gold and other commodities undertaken by or at the behest of the U.S. government, or whether surreptitious futures market manipulation is considered legal when the government arranges it:
https://www.gata.org/node/23054
A more candid and honest analyst also might inquire publicly about the uses of the Central Bank Incentive Program run by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, operator of all the major futures markets in the United States:
https://www.cmegroup.com/content/dam/cmegroup/market-regulation/rule-filings/2019/12/19-500_1.pdf
The program extends volume trading discounts to governments and central banks for their surreptitious trading in all CME futures contracts. A more candid and honest analyst might wonder whether the program would exist if it is never used. He also might wonder exactly how it is being used.
A more candid and honest analyst might be openly suspicious of the gold swaps long reported on a monthly basis by the Bank for International Settlements, transactions that confirm surreptitious intervention in the gold market by central banks, the operators of the BIS:
https://www.gata.org/node/23064
These transactions might strike a more candid and honest analyst as suspicious insofar as the BIS refuses to explain them -- their objectives and participants.
A more candid and honest analyst might pursue the proclaimation by a top BIS official, speaking to an assembly of dozens of central bank representatives and academics in 2005, that a primary purpose of central bank cooperation is "to influence asset prices -- especially gold and foreign exchange -- in circumstances where this might be thought useful":
https://www.gata.org/node/4279
A more candid and honest analyst might ask: What are those circumstances? Do they endure? Or are the gold and currency markets now all calm, sweetness, and light, as Christian seems to want people to think?
Christian implies that all doubts about U.S. government involvement in the gold market are resolved by the Fort Knox audits he cites. But true or false, the audits say nothing about the big issues of government intervention in gold. For Christian the audits are just convenient instruments of distraction with which he may ingratiate himself with CPM Group's central bank clients.
Christian's battle with the straw men can be viewed at YouTube here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ytW1Aoy-2w
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
CPowell@GATA.org
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