McEwen Mining Chairman and CEO Rob McEwen, founder of Goldcorp, told investors in a conference call November 3 that his company is fully aware of the rigging of the gold market but is not trying to do anything about.
Disappointing as this is generally and should be for his company's shareholders particularly, McEwen is far ahead of most other executives of monetary metals mining companies, since at least he can admit the obvious.
McEwen's comments are noted in today's edition of Ed Steer's Gold and Silver Digest letter, published by GATA Board of Directors member Ed Steer (https://www.edsteergoldandsilver.com/).
The transcript of the conference call can be found at Yahoo Finance here --
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/edited-transcr...s-conference...
-- and here is the relevant section:
"The next question is from an anonymous private investor. He makes a number of statements, starting with: In the last five years bitcoin has gone from roughly $500 to $7,300 and gold has done nothing over the same time -- roughly $1,200 in 2013 and $1,270 today. Given the trillions of dollars from worldwide quantitative easing, these actions are very suggestive of price manipulation of the gold market. Anyone looking at a live gold report can see that every time gold starts to run, someone puts a boot on its throat. This is more evidence of gold manipulation. Question: What is being done to stop this obvious manipulation of the precious metals markets? Why aren't miners banning together to stop what's happening? Or are you or they?"
McEwen replies: "I'd just like to say that with regard to bitcoin, it has become, for the moment, an accepted form of transferring money. It's digital. It's, at the moment, unregulated by governments -- unmonitored, private space -- and is being bid up. ..." In the gold market "there are five big players that have hallmarks and they make a price for gold. It's an asset that's held by central banks. And therefore, viewed by central banks, sometimes, like the canary in a coal mine. If it's going up too fast, it might suggest something is wrong with the economy, and no government or central bank would like to make that statement. So yes, it probably is being manipulated under the auspices of stabilizing the market.
"There's a lot of tax dollars behind the government and trying to stop this obvious manipulation is perhaps difficult. Also, in the gold market, it's a very large paper gold market that's much greater than the physical market, and it seems to overshadow the price and is at the disposal of large pools of capital.
"We're not out there, I guess, trying to stop it. We're out there trying to build our resources and get to a point where we're producing, where we can make a profit at any price."
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"Make a profit at any price"? Central banks might be delighted if McEwen Mining and other monetary metals mining companies could discover how to make a profit even if the price of the metals fell to zero. But is any other industry so indifferent to its product's "price discovery"?
