CBC Documentary: The Secret World of Gold

Hi Golden Boy. Is your real name Dan Dontrose by any chance?

This is not SW !

I am not an expert trader. I was never a journalist.
I have no interest in metals.

I have watched both the Canadian and international versions of The Secret World of Gold, as well as the shorter web piece. I also have discussed it with people in the gold market who have seen it. As anyone who has seen it knows, they interviewed me for the piece.

I must say this, as both an expert in gold and a formerly very well regarded journalist: This mockumentary is a shameful disgrace to the world of journalism. They have gotten most historical and recent facts wrong. The piece is full of errors that they should have caught. For example, there was a full scale audit of the deep storage gold held at Fort Knox not too long ago, and the materials are in fact audited regularly. Ron Paul had hearings on this a few years ago at which the Treasury provided him a detailed description of the multi-year bar by bar inspection program. Yet the film producers chose to focus on Eric Sprott’s obscene contention that he believes the gold ‘probably’ is not there. The film has many, many more factual errors throughout.

Worse, they have accepted Andrew Maguire as a legitimate former trader, even though you were informed by at least one source that he was a fraud. You apparently did nothing to qualify him as a bona fide trader with real experience, in contrast to the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times, CNN, BBC, and other legitimate journalistic enterprises that found they could not verify that he ever was in fact a gold trader, that he refused to provide one shred of credible evidence that he ever was a trader, or that any of his comments were based in anything other than attention seeking. The producers voiced-over pictures of Bart Chilton, one of the CFTC’s commissioners, with comments from Maguire saying how he interacted with Chilton. Chilton did not verify this in the film, but the producers purposefully try to give the impression he verified this happened.

The producers additionally have engaged in the most sensationalistic form of misrepresentation. One example: As my friend and client, Sam Sporn, discusses the Morgan Stanley case, on which I should note I was the expert witness for the plaintiffs and explained to Sam and the court the nature of the over-charging by Morgan Stanley, he is explaining how the issue was that Morgan Stanley was charging clients to hold allocated metals on their accounts when in fact it was holding unallocated metals. While that is the voice-over, the film shows some people opening an empty vault, implying that the metal was not there. That is whorish journalism, period. There can be no argument but that the film makers were trying to be sensationalistic in that. Indeed, throughout the entire documentary, the producers have this breathless narrator repeatedly mis-representing history, even down to the events of the fall of Poland during World War II.

In summary, shame on the film makers. They are not documentary film producers. They are sensationalists and distorters of facts who either chose to ignore major lies or were not competent to recognize them.