Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
Our friend M.V. writes:
Is it not possible to sue the banksters in London for manipulating the gold price? It is obvious that the price of gold is manipulated if you look at what happened yesterday. It is fraud.
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Of course it is possible to sue banks. These days one can be sued for wearing socks that don't match.
But yes, the United Kingdom has a Competition Act and presumably the bullion banks and the London Bullion Market Association could be sued under that. The discovery operations -- pretrial investigation -- facilitated by such a suit well might find anti-competitive and impermissible communications among the bullion banks in London, activity more extensive than the impermissible communications found among the bullion banks in New York and successfully prosecuted criminally and civilly there in recent years.
If GATA had a few million pounds to spend on such litigation, or if any U.K. law firm saw a good prospect of success in a class-action sort of lawsuit that would be worth undertaking on a contingency basis, a lawsuit probably would be brought. But GATA doesn't have such resources, and World Gold Council and the rest of gold mining industry, which do have that kind of money, are perfectly indifferent to gold price suppression, probably because of their vulnerability to government regulation and their own banks.
Quite apart from the bullion banks in London, the U.K. Treasury has an Exchange Equalization Account, similar to the U.S. Treasury's Exchange Stabilization Fund, both of which are authorized to intervene in the gold and currency markets. Indeed, the U.S. ESF is authorized to operate in secret throughout the world and to rig markets worldwide, which is logical, if dishonest, the U.S. dollar being the world reserve currency.
The UK's EEA does not seem to be that extensively authorized but it is not likely to give up its secrets any more easily than the Bank of England, which is intimately involved in the gold market and operates in that market in secret on its own behalf and on the behalf of other governments and bullion banks and which last year refused to answer GATA's inquiry about its gold leasing, a primary mechanism of gold price suppression:
GATA is not expert in the exemptions from the U.K.'s public records laws. But even without suing U.K. authorities, in the last 20 years, with the help of many people around the world, GATA has compiled so much documentation --
-- that official policy of gold price suppression seems beyond dispute among honest and impartial people. Dishonest and compromised people in the financial sector seldom dare even to discuss the issue anymore. In polite company it is a prohibited subject.
So the most relevant question here may be simply whether there will come any point at which the gold mining industry, financial news organizations, ordinary investors generally, and advocates of free markets and human rights care enough to join GATA's clamor for transparency and accountability in gold trading and the currency markets generally.
Since we're up against nearly all the money and power in the world, that point probably remains at least a few days away. Many people who have dealt with the issue for a long time consider the struggle hopeless. As the dramatic painting by Alain Despert on the home page of GATA's internet site suggests, the struggle indeed may be a bit quixotic. But since the official interventions against gold particularly and free markets generally are becoming ever more obvious and laughable, and since GATA has enough wonderful friends and supporters at least to keep our flag flying, we aim to keep at it. It's very educational, and even if we don't overthrow the evil system, spite helps sustain us, as we're always letting the bad guys know that someone is on to them.
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
CPowell@GATA.org
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