Replying to your secretary/treasurer's speculation last night that central
banks lately may have moved from gold price suppression to allowing gold to
rise to help devalue currencies and debt -–
http://www.gata.org/node/16427
-- market analyst Dan Norcini asserts that GATA has come over to his
position:
http://news.goldseek.com/DanNorcini/1462284120.php
Not at all.
In the first place, Norcini had just written that rather than helping
central banks avert deflation, a dramatically rising gold price would
actually signify the end of the world:
http://news.goldseek.com/DanNorcini/1462129200.php
That is, Norcini wrote: "I still cannot stomach so many of these gold
cult members who seem not to understand that when they are cheering
predictions of $5,000, $50,000, etc., gold prices, they are cheering the ruin
of everything around them."
Your secretary/treasurer's speculation had explicitly contradicted
Norcini's assertion. So there's no agreement there.
Now Norcini writes: "I had been saying for some time that the Fed was not
behind weakness in the gold price ever since the dollar embarked on its bull
run back in 2014."
Huh -- 2014? But GATA began complaining of gold market manipulation
and suppression 15 years earlier, and Norcini goes on to concede that
during much of that time he subscribed to GATA's views.
So do GATA and Norcini disagree only as to exactly when in the last few
years central banks generally or the Federal Reserve particularly may have
discontinued gold price suppression?
Once again, not really.
In the first place, your secretary/treasurer's commentary last night was
admittedly only speculation. GATA doesn't know that Federal Reserve
policy has changed from gold price suppression to dollar devaluation. Indeed,
that speculation arose in large part from suspicion that central banks may
not have lost control of the gold market and that, if gold is rising again,
it is only because that is what central banks now want it to do and how they
are guiding the market with their surreptitious trading.
That the Fed to this day remains up to its neck in gold market
manipulation was confirmed at the central bank's highest levels just a few
weeks ago when the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, William
Dudley, taking questions at a public forum in Virginia, clumsily refused to
answer one about whether the Fed is involved in gold swaps. Then his press
spokesman refused even to acknowledge GATA's follow-up question on the
subject:
http://www.gata.org/node/16341
Anyone who doubts that U.S. government policy toward gold prior to 2014
was a policy of suppression is implored to dispute, specifically, document by
document, the official records compiled here --
http://www.gata.org/node/14839
-- and here:
http://www.gata.org/node/16377
Norcini has not done that, though of course no one else who disparages
GATA has done so either. In the absence of such dispute, it may be assumed
that the records are genuine and that they are fairly construed as GATA has
construed them.
Just as GATA doesn't care much about price predictions for gold, positive
or negative, it doesn't care much about the "technical analysis"
offered by Norcini and other gold market commentators, "technical
analysis" of rigged markets being mere hallucination.
Rather, GATA cares mainly about free markets and limited, transparent, and
accountable government, and so agreement or disagreement with GATA rests on
the answers to these questions:
-- Are central banks involved in the gold market surreptitiously or not?
-- If central banks are involved in the gold market
surreptitiously, is it just for fun -- for example, to see which central
bank's trading desk can make the most money by cheating the most investors --
or is it for policy purposes?
-- If central banks are surreptitiously in the gold market for
policy purposes, are these the traditional purposes of defeating a
potentially competitive world reserve currency? Or have these purposes lately
expanded to include purposes like devaluing currencies and debt to avert a
catastrophic worldwide debt deflation, the emergency policy anticipated in
2006 by the Scottish economist Peter Millar, whose study of gold revaluation
often has been publicized by GATA?:
http://www.gata.org/node/4843
-- If central banks, creators of infinite money, are surreptitiously
trading a market, how can it be considered a market at all, and how can any
country or the world ever enjoy a market economy again?
Just as Norcini has not challenged GATA's documentation of gold market
rigging, he also seems not to have addressed those questions. But then no
other critic of GATA has addressed them either. For as Chesterton wrote a
hundred years ago, "As is common in most modern discussions, the
unmentionable thing is the pivot of the whole discussion."
If central banks are surreptitiously trading markets, Norcini's
"technical analysis" is the least of the casualties. In that case
markets and even democracy itself are finished.
