Dear Friend of GATA and Gold (and Silver):
Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
Excerpts in English from GATA consultant Dimitri Speck's recent book, "Geheime Goldpolitik" ("Secret Gold Politics"), which so far has been published only in German, have been posted at the book's Internet site and make fascinating reading.
Among other things, Speck shows that the gold sold by central banks since 2001 was equaled by the leased gold returned to them. This strongly supports suspicions long expressed by GATA and others that the supposed central bank gold sales of the last decade were just cash settlements for leased gold that could not be recovered by the central banks without exploding the gold price upward and bankrupting the investment banks that had leased the gold, and that the "sales" were not really putting any metal into the market, a suspicion supported by the steady rise of the gold price even as all that central bank gold supposedly was being sold.
Speck also reports that 66 percent of Germany's gold reserve is held in the United States and 21 percent in London. This likely puts the German gold at the center of the gold price suppression scheme managed by the U.S. Federal Reserve and Treasury Department and the Bank of England. As the German central bank, the Bundesbank, itself acknowledged last year in a statement to GATA consultant Rob Kirby, Germany keeps much of its gold at "gold trading centers" abroad "in order to conduct its gold activities":
http://www.gata.org/node/7713
You can find the English excerpts from Speck's "Geheime Goldpolitik" here:
http://www.geheime-goldpolitik.de/english/
A week ago your secretary/treasurer wrote to the Bundesbank asking whether it has ever engaged in gold swaps with any agency of the United States government. The Bundesbank's press office quickly acknowledged the inquiry and assigned it a reference number: 2010 / 019791. Of course we don't expect a quick and honest answer to such a sensitive question, but an honest answer just might be hastened if GATA's German friends also began pressing the question with the Bundesbank and with their elected representatives. The e-mail address of the Bundesbank's press office is:
presse-information@bundesbank.de
Chris Powell
GATA.org
