A week ago your secretary/treasurer wrote to the press offices of the Bank of England and the United Kingdom Treasury Department, asking two questions:
-- Have the Bank of England and the Treasury's Exchange Equalisation Account (or any agency answering to the bank or the Treasury) leased gold in the last 12 months?
-- Has any leased gold been returned to the bank, the Treasury, or any agency answering to them in the last 12 months?
While the bank and the Treasury have replied to GATA's inquiries before, sometimes as quickly as a day or two, sometimes a month later, no reply to these question has been received so far.
We will continue to press for answers.
Of course sometimes the failure to answer is almost as good as an answer itself, as with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which repeatedly has refused to answer questions posed by GATA and U.S. Rep. Alex X. Mooney, R-West Virginia, as to whether the commission has jurisdiction over manipulative futures market trading conducted by or at the behest of the U.S. government, or whether such manipulative trading is authorized by the Gold Reserve Act of 1934 as amended.
The gold leasing question may have special pertinence lately in light of the turmoil in the gold market over the last year. If the British government or another major government has increased its meddling in the gold market lately, of course that market would be much less of a market than investors think it is.
Unfortunately few market analysts will pose or even acknowledge questions of government intervention, even though, especially with the gold market, government intervention increasingly is a primary determinant of prices. That's why no analysis that fails to acknowledge or question this intervention is worth much.
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
CPowell@GATA.org
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