While most market analysts who have denied central bank and government intervention against gold have long since gone silent on the issue, Managing Partner Jeff Christian of metals consultancy CPM Group continues to disparage such complaints as "conspiracy theory."
In an interview last week with Money Metals Exchange's Mike Gleason, Christian tries to reduce the issue to what he considers ordinary and small-time market manipulation by individual traders.
"We don't see grand conspiracies and we see a tremendous amount of evidence that these grand conspiracies do not exist," Christian says.
That is, Christian doesn't see the monthly interventions of the Bank for International Settlements in the gold market on behalf of its central bank members, interventions confirmed by the bank's own monthly statements of account.
He doesn't see the "central bank incentive program" of trading discounts extended by CME Group, operator of the major U.S. futures exchanges, to governments and central banks for their surreptitious trading of all major futures contracts, including gold and silver.
He doesn't see the refusal of the U.S. Treasury Department and Federal Reserve to answer U.S. Rep. Alex Mooney's questions about which markets they are secretly trading in and why.
He doesn't see the closed meetings regularly held by the major international financial organizations, from the BIS to the International Monetary Fund to the G-7 Gold and Foreign Exchange Committee, wherein intervention policy is formulated and implemented in secret -- the very definition of "conspiracy."
Christian disparages "the guys who make their living marketing conspiracy theories," but fails to acknowledge that his company is a consultant to central banks and might lose some business if it inquired too much about what they are doing in secret.
Of course far better livings are made by shilling for central banks and governments than by investigating and criticizing them.
Asked if central banks have the ability to suppress monetary metals prices, Christian replies: "I don't know if they have the ability, but I don't think they have the desire." He minimizes gold's place in the world financial system, calling the monetary metal "a meaningless moniker" and "a footnote." But then why would central banks bother consulting with CPM Group in the first place? And why would so many central banks lately have been announcing gold acquisitions?
This is what is left of those who deny that central banks intervene against gold. Listen to the full interview here.
Chris Powell is a political columnist and former managing editor at the Journal Inquirer, a daily newspaper in Manchester, Connecticut, USA, where he has worked since graduating high school in 1967. His column is published in newspapers throughout Connecticut. He is also secretary/treasurer of the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc., (GATA) which he co-founded in 1999 to expose and oppose the rigging of the gold market by Western central banks and their investment bank agents.
