Annoyed at former International Monetary Fund economist Kenneth Rogoff for
having lent some respectability to gold this month, for having recommended that
developing countries hold less of their foreign exchange reserves in
zero-interest developed-nation bonds and more in gold --
http://www.gata.org/node/16466
-- Financial Times columnist John Plender today can't concede Rogoff's
point without disparaging the monetary metal:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/8174208e-21bb-...1776a5124d.html
"Gold," Plender writes, "has been a bubble for
millennia."
Some bubble! Don't millennia compare pretty well with the individual human
lifespan? For how many millennia are Plender and the Financial Times planning
to keep disparaging the monetary metal?
Repeating the appalling rookie mistake Rogoff himself made, Plender writes
that gold "yields no dividends or interest," though central banks
and others lend gold at interest every day just as government currencies are
lent at interest.
Then Plender knocks gold for volatility and "capriciousness."
Of course the Financial Times could always shed a little light on gold's
volatility and capriciousness by inquiring into the long and continuing
history of surreptitious intervention in the gold market by Western central
banks, which, when they don't think anyone outside their circle is listening,
acknowledge that they trade gold and gold derivatives "nearly on a daily
basis" to control and usually suppress the monetary metal's price and
thereby protect their own currencies.
Extensive documentation of this market rigging has been compiled by the
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee here --
http://www.gata.org/node/14839
-- and this documentation often has been given to journalists at the
Financial Times, including Plender himself.
Inadvertently showing how easy it would be for journalists to validate this
documentation, just a few weeks ago the president of the Federal Reserve Bank
of New York, William Dudley, clumsily refused at a public forum in Virginia
to answer a question about whether the Fed is involved in gold swaps --
http://www.gata.org/node/16341
-- gold swaps having been identified by a secret 1999 report of the
International Monetary Fund as a primary mechanism of gold price suppression:
http://www.gata.org/node/12016
Of course the Financial Times is entitled to its politics -- statist and
establishment as opposed to individualist and questioning. But the FT
purports to be a news organization as well as an advocate of a political
ideology. So the FT should show more interest in exposing what governments
are doing in what are mistakenly assumed to be free markets.
The FT should not be opining so arrogantly about gold's place in the world
monetary system without first putting to central banks a few critical
questions about their surreptitious involvement in the gold market and the
policy purposes behind it. And yet as far as your secretary/treasurer can
tell, the FT has never attempted that. Indeed, the first rule of journalism
at the Financial Times seems to be: Never put a critical question to a
central bank.
As a result, when it comes to gold and indeed much else, the FT remains
capable only of disinformation.
