Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
Financial letter writer Mark Hulbert, commenting today for MarketWatch.com, says he knows what's dragging the gold price down -- unfavorable sentiment among other financial letter writers and unfavorable charts:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/heres-the-real-reason-gold-is-falling-2...
It's no matter to Hulbert that by their own admission central banks are trading in the gold market "nearly every day," presumably for policy purposes rather than for fun competitions among their foreign exchange desks --
http://www.gata.org/node/13373
http://www.gata.org/node/12717
-- nor that, as noted by GATA consultant Rob Kirby of Kirby Analytics in Toronto, the U.S. government's broker, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., maintains trillions of dollars' worth of interest rate derivatives that cannot possibly be hedged, cannot be anything other than government intervention in the bond markets:
http://news.goldseek.com/GoldSeek/1249407911.php
No, to hear Hulbert tell it, it's all lousy sentiment and charts -- as if that surreptitious trading by central banks might not be creating the lousy sentiment and charts.
Maybe technical analysts like Hulbert shouldn't be scorned too much. They can't want to believe in or even know about central bank intervention in markets because it would nullify their work, their whole careers, revealing that they have been interpreting mere holograms created precisely to deceive them. But the self-importance of these analysts is both ridiculous and insufferable.
In a time of comprehensive market interventions by central banks, technical analysis is no more useful than reading entrails or tea leaves. But there would be plenty of room for technical analysts in another occupation: financial journalism. They would need only to put a few specific questions to central banks about their involvement in the gold and interest rate markets and they would have financial journalism all to themselves.
