美联储的黄金互换协议
2010-10-31 21:37阅读：
有关黄金的背景知识文章。各国中央银行的黄金储备数据并不是直白的，因为其统计方式外人不清楚（存在黄金互换协议等），而且并不一定及时公布或者准确公布，而且基本没有法律要求审计这些数据以及实物。在黄金市场是没有自由贸易的。所以，黄金是完全的被操纵的市场。实物黄金价值大大低于目前黄金市场的总价值（各种衍生市场比如纸黄金等等）。纳粹德国占领欧洲大陆时，把黄金都运回德国，然后操纵被战国的货币，让德国成为无风险的纯贸易赤字国家（生产产品从被战国到德国的单向流动），就像当今的美国，或者说美国在经济上已经如德国对欧洲大陆一样占领了世界。美国仍然是黄金之主。从另外一个方面来讲，美元要维持世界储备货币的地位，黄金价格必须下去。
The Fed's Secret Gold Swap
Arrangements
Oct 30, 2010 - 10:40 AM
By: Global_Research
Chris Powell writes: The precious metals markets have tremendous
potential for investors. But they are also wrapped up in great
mystery – deliberately so.
Gold is the worst understood financial market. Most official data
about gold is actually disinformation.
Years ago GATA disclosed that the International Monetary Fund, the
leading compiler of official gold res
erve data, allowed its member nations to count gold they had
leased, gold that had left their vaults, as if it was still in
their vaults. The effect of this accounting fraud was to deceive
the gold market into thinking that central banks had much more gold
left to bomb the market with than they really did.
But that's only the start of the false data.
In April 2009 China caused a bit of a sensation by announcing that
its gold reserves had increased by 76 percent, from 600 tonnes to
1,054 tonnes. For the previous six years China had been reporting
to the IMF only 600 tonnes. Had China acquired those 454 new tonnes
only in the last year? Very unlikely. Experts now believe that
China acquired those 454 new tonnes over at least several years,
largely by purchasing the production of China's own fast-growing
gold mining industry. So for as many as six years the official gold
reserve data about China was way off.
This June the World Gold Council reported that Saudi Arabia's gold
reserves had increased by 126 percent, from 143 to 323 tonnes, just
since 2008. That the world's oil-exporting superpower had made such
a new commitment to gold in its foreign exchange reserves also
caused a brief sensation.
But a few weeks later the governor of the Saudi Arabia Monetary
Authority, Muhammad al Jasser, insisted to news reporters in Kuwait
that Saudi Arabia had not purchased the gold cited in the June
reports but rather had that extra gold all along in what he called
'other accounts' – that is, in accounts not reported officially,
just as the true status of China's gold accounts was not reported
officially for six years, if the true status is being reported even
now.
Some analysts think that China and Saudi Arabia have accumulated
far more gold than they're reporting and are accumulating still
more gold surreptitiously – China to hedge its dollar foreign
exchange surplus, Saudi Arabia to hedge both its dollar surplus and
the depletion of its oil reserves – but that China and Saudi Arabia
can't acknowledge this accumulation lest they spook the currency
markets and devalue their dollar surpluses before those surpluses
are fully hedged.
In August 2009 GATA consultant Rob Kirby of Kirby Analytics in
Toronto obtained from Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank, a
written admission that much of Germany's national gold is held
outside the country at 'trading centers' at which the Bundesbank
may 'conduct its gold activities.' Without explicitly confirming
that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York was one of those 'trading
centers,' the Bundesbank noted to Kirby that the New York Fed holds
gold for 60 nations and international organizations.
But exactly how much German gold is where and for what purpose,
particularly trading purposes? How much German gold been leased or
otherwise encumbered? The Bundesbank wouldn't say.
In September 2009, in the course of seeking access to gold records
from the Federal Reserve and then suing the Fed in U.S. District
Court for the District of Columbia, GATA obtained a sensational
written admission from the Fed, signed by Fed Board of Governors
member Kevin M. Warsh, a former member of the President's Working
Group on Financial Markets – the so-called 'Plunge Protection
Team.' Warsh wrote that the Fed has secret gold swap arrangements
with foreign banks and that these arrangements must be kept
secret.
So has gold from the U.S. reserve been swapped? Does the United
States really have 8,200 tonnes of gold in its reserve, as it long
has claimed to have?
Fed Governor Warsh didn't quite say that U.S. gold had been
swapped, only that the Fed has gold swap arrangements. But the U.S.
gold reserve hasn't been audited in more than half a century, and
the last audit wasn't really complete. So in the next session of
Congress U.S. Rep. Ron Paul hopes to introduce legislation
requiring an audit of the gold reserve, including specifically any
encumbrances like swaps and leases.
Then there are the major gold and silver exchange-traded funds,
which were established in the last few years supposedly to help
ordinary investors invest conveniently in gold and silver. How much
metal do the ETFs have?
While the major gold and silver ETFs frequently report their metal
holdings, studies by GoldMoney founder James Turk and GATA board
member Catherine Austin Fitts and her lawyer, Carolyn Betts,
suggest that this data is unreliable too. For the major ETFs won't
disclose exactly where their metal is, and indeed their
prospectuses say it's OK for the ETFs not even to know where their
metal is kept among custodians and sub-custodians. And the
custodians for the major gold and silver ETFs are, perhaps not so
coincidentally, also the two major international banks that report
having the biggest short positions in gold and silver, short
positions that give these banks and metal custodians a powerful
interest in suppressing the price of the assets they supposedly are
holding for investors who want those assets to rise in value.
How much gold do the major gold and silver ETFs really have in
their vaults? How much of it is encumbered in some way? ETF
investors themselves will never be permitted to know.
The biggest so-called 'physical' gold market in the world is the
one run by the London Bullion Market Association. The LBMA
publishes statistics on how much gold and silver are traded by its
members. But these statistics show spectacular volumes, more metal
than could possibly exist. Of course much of this metal could be
sold and resold back and forth many times every day. But an expert
in that market, Jeffrey Christian of the CPM Group, acknowledged at
the March 25 hearing of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading
Commission, as he had acknowledged in an explanatory report
published in 2000, that the London bullion market is actually a
fractional-reserve gold-banking system built on the presumption
that most gold buyers will never take delivery of their metal but
rather leave it on deposit with the LBMA members from whom they
bought it.
GATA board member Adrian Douglas has studied the LBMA statistics
and Christian's work and estimates that the great majority of gold
sold by LBMA members doesn't exist – that most gold sales by LBMA
members are highly leveraged. How leveraged? How much gold is due
from LBMA members that doesn't really exist? The LBMA doesn't
report that. Like the Fed's gold swap arrangements, the world
mustn't be permitted to know. The consequences might be
catastrophic for the banking interests that run the world.
For then the world might understand why even at its recent price
above $1,300 per ounce gold has not come close to keeping up with
the inflation, the currency debasement, of the last few decades,
why gold has not fulfilled its function of hedging against
inflation. That is, gold's enemies figured out how to increase its
supply by vast amounts without going through the trouble of digging
it out of the ground. They invented 'paper gold' – gold that
doesn't exist but that many buyers accepted, never suspecting that
major financial institutions might deceive or defraud them.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The misunderstanding of the gold market continues with the awful
journalism about it.
The falsity of the data about the gold market practically screams
at financial journalists:
There's the omission by official gold reserve reports of leased and
swapped gold.
There are the sudden huge changes in official gold reserve
totals.
There are the deception and conflicts of interest built into ETF
prospectuses.
The valid documentation about the gold market also practically
screams at financial journalists:
There are the huge and disproportionate gold, silver, and interest
rate derivative positions built up at just two or three
international banks, positions that never could be undertaken
without the express or implicit underwriting of the U.S.
government.
And there are the dozens of official records, records collected and
publicized by GATA over the years, demonstrating the plans and
desire of the U.S. government to suppress and control the price of
gold.
But financial journalists just don't ask about these things. After
all, who are the major advertisers in the financial news media? The
market manipulators and governments themselves.
Here are a couple of examples of this grotesque failure of
journalism just from this year.
In June the Bank for International Settlements, the central bank of
the central banks, disclosed, via a footnote in its annual report,
that it had undertaken a gold swap of unprecedented size, 346
tonnes. But the BIS provided no explanation. A newsletter writer
was the first to come upon the information; only then did it leach
into the major financial news media. What was going on here?
The reporters for the major financial news media didn't bother
going to the source, didn't bother asking the BIS itself. It was
simply assumed that central banks never give serious answers about
what they do. Instead the reporters called various gold market
analysts for what they hoped would be informed speculation.
A few days after GATA ridiculed the Reuters news agency for not
demanding answers from the source, the BIS, Reuters did try putting
some questions to the bank, and on July 16 Reuters reported: 'The
BIS said the gold in question was used for 'pure swap operations
with commercial banks' but declined to respond to further questions
from Reuters on the transaction.'
For a year I have been urging financial journalists to call the
Federal Reserve to ask for an explanation of the secret gold swap
arrangements admitted by Fed Governor Warsh. As far as I know, no
news organization has put such questions to the Fed officially.
But, a bit intrigued, a reporter for another major news agency,
having failed to get her editor's authorization to pursue a story
about gold, called the Fed on her own and did ask about the gold
swap arrangements. She told me that a Fed spokesman had told her:
'Oh, we never talk about those things.'
GATA has been gaining publicity over the last year, if with great
difficulty. A few months ago the Financial Times did a big story
about gold that was half about GATA's complaints about gold price
manipulation by central banks and their associated bullion banks.
But the FT reporter failed to put any of our complaints and
questions to any central bank or government official.
How can you report complaints of central bank gold price
manipulation without questioning central banks themselves? Again,
it's just taken for granted that central banks operate in secret
and there's no point in questioning them.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Maybe this journalistic negligence will change a little because of
the remarkable event yesterday in Washington.
A member of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Bart
Chilton, to whom GATA Chairman Bill Murphy, in a meeting at CFTC
headquarters in Washington in December 2008, delivered evidence of
the manipulation of the gold and silver markets, made a statement
that had a noticeable effect on those markets. At a CFTC hearing
yesterday Chilton issued a formal statement urging his commission
to answer to the public for the commission's seemingly interminable
investigation of the silver market.
Chilton added: 'I believe that there have been repeated attempts to
influence prices in the silver markets. There have been fraudulent
efforts to persuade and deviously control that price. Based on what
I have been told by members of the public and reviewed in publicly
available documents, I believe violations to the Commodity Exchange
Act have taken place in silver markets and that any such violation
of the law in this regard should be prosecuted.'
Within hours Chilton's statement had become international news. Of
course that doesn't mean that financial news organizations will
press the precious metals market manipulation story vigorously now.
But the story just became a lot harder to ignore. Indeed, just a
few hours ago a lawsuit complaining of silver price manipulation by
J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and HSBC was filed in U.S. District
Court for the Southern District of New York.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Why is gold such a mystery? Why is it, along with silver, kept such
a mystery?
It's because the two precious metals are not only money but, from
the point of view of free individuals, the best sort of money, less
susceptible to what governments see as the most desirable quality
of money – the susceptibility to control by government and
particularly its susceptibility to devaluation. You can print or
otherwise issue gold and silver derivatives to infinity, but not
the metals themselves.
Gold particularly is kept such a mystery because it is the key to
unlocking the currency markets, which long have been the most
efficient mechanisms of imperialism.
Many of you have heard about the looting of Europe that was
undertaken by the Nazi German occupation during World War II. But
most of that looting did not take place at the point of a gun. No,
it took place through the currency markets.
This looting through the currency markets was spelled out by the
November 1943 issue of a military intelligence letter published by
the U.S. War Department, a letter called Tactical and Technical
Trends. Of course the Nazi occupation seized whatever central bank
gold reserves had not been sent out of the occupied countries in
time. But then the Nazi occupation either issued special occupation
currency that could not be used in Germany itself or, in countries
that had fairly sophisticated banking systems, took over the
domestic central bank and enforced an exchange rate much more
favorable to the reichsmark. Or else the Nazi occupation simply
printed for itself and spent huge new amounts of the regular
currency of the occupied country. This control of the currency
markets drafted every resident of the occupied countries into the
service of the occupation and achieved a one-way flow of production
– a flow out of the occupied countries and into Germany.
For a few years Nazi Germany had one hell of a trade deficit. But
being in the position to print the currencies for occupied Europe,
Nazi Germany never had to cover that deficit.
Since the United States now issues the reserve currency for the
world, the dollar, the United States now more or less occupies most
countries economically, even those countries that have their own
currencies, since even those countries hold most of their foreign
exchange reserves in dollars.
Free-trading and widely accessible gold always has been and always
will be a threat to the rigging of the currency markets, always
will be the escape from overbearing government generally and from
any overbearing government in particular. That is why so many U.S.
government records compiled by GATA over the years candidly discuss
or advocate or describe controlling and suppressing the gold
market. A declassified cable from the U.S. Embassy in Paris to the
State Department in Washington, written in March 1968, even talks
about the necessity for U.S. monetary officials to remain what the
cable calls 'the masters of gold.' This is also why U.S. government
agencies like the Federal Reserve are trying desperately to prevent
other such documents from being disclosed.
That is, gold is the secret knowledge of the financial universe and
its true value relative to currencies is vastly greater than its
nominal price today, since much of the gold that investors think
they own doesn't exist.
GATA's work is to bust this secret open. Russia, China, and other
Asian countries have figured out that the dollar reserve system is
the mechanism of their economic enslavement and have started to
prepare their liberation by accumulating gold in a big way before
gold is formally reinstated as the world reserve currency or as a
big part of that new reserve currency. Now you're in on the secret
too. This wonderful conference will give you many good ideas for
preparing yourselves profitably. But just make sure that whenever
you buy precious metal, you're getting metal, not paper. Otherwise
you'll just be sabotaging yourself.
This is the text of a speech given at the Gold Anti-Trust Action
Committee Inc. New Orleans Investment Conference on October 27,
2010. Reprinted with permission.
