By Patrick Wood, Editor
December 9, 2008
[Editor’s note: members of the 
Trilateral Commission and companies with Commission representation appear in bold type.]
Since 1973, this writer has made inquiry as to the location and ownership of the vast stores of monetary gold (400 oz., .999 pure bars) in the world. There has not been a formal audit on Fort Knox, for instance, since the Eisenhower administration. Official statistics on gold holdings are often contradictory. Getting plain answers from any Central Bank in the world, including the Fed, is virtually impossible.
This paper points out a pattern of manipulation that has been clearly observed by many people. However, patterns do not exist in a vacuum, but rather they are evidence of the existence of a stable and consistent methodology. Clearly, more study needs to be done in identifying the finer parts of the methodology and its designers, but this is a good start!
When Richard Nixon canceled the Bretton Woods system in 1971, exchangeability of paper dollars for gold was terminated. In 1970 alone, available gold vs. dollars outstanding had shrunk from 55 to 22 percent, thus exerting pressure for investors to switch to gold to avoid further dilution of dollar assets.
Although the economic and financial experts swore that gold was an outmoded, ineffective and useless financial asset, cooler heads knew better. In recent years, these same experts have reversed field and are now proclaiming that gold is still, and always has been, a consistent monetary asset. Why the flip-flop?
The economic chaos in the world today is a direct result of policies set in motion to foster a New International Economic Order (NIEO). The NIEO was the explicit creation of the Trilateral Commission, founded by David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1973, and their early papers and task force reports clearly asserted their NIEO plans.
Members of the Trilateral Commission were instrumental in creating the European Union as well. The EU is the prototype of global governance that will soon exert its influence to reshuffle world relationships.
Since 1973, Trilateralists have dominated the Executive Branch of the U.S. government with politicians like Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Dick Cheney. This has led to domination of the world trade mechanisms like the World Bank and negotiation of free trade agreements.
Six out of eight presidents of the World Bank have been members of the Commission. Eight out of ten of the U.S. Trade Representatives (USTR) have been Commissioners.
Indeed, the Trilateral Commission has had undue influence and control over the development of globalization, and it was self-interested at best.
With today’s total meltdown in economic and global financial markets, one must ask, “Are these people just plain stupid?”
The answer has to be “No”, considering their great success at consistently dominating political and economic processes over a span of thirty-five years.
So what else is going on?
There is mounting evidence that there has been a larger plan underway to corner the global supply of gold, thus laying the groundwork for a global currency exclusively controlled by Trilaterals and their friends. By extension, economic and political mechanisms would be controlled to the same extent.
From a Trilateral perspective, the Bretton Woods system had two flaws:
- Gold was rapidly being decentralized into non-Trilateral hands
- It limited the arbitrary creation of paper money to finance projects launched by Trilateral-related global companies. (Read Trilaterals Over Washington (Sutton & Wood) for detailed documentation on this process)
The breakup of Bretton Woods and the resulting opportunities may have been the principal rationale for the creation of the Trilateral Commission in the first place.
Since 1973, there has been an overarching plan to quietly centralize gold into private hands, using incrementally created wealth made possible by rapidly inflating paper currencies.
This theory must be explored and tested, because if true, it represents not just the hijacking of America (already thoroughly demonstrated elsewhere in this writer’s papers), but the hijacking of an entire planet!
In 1976, Antony Sutton wrote,
“The assault on gold today is an integral part of a planned move into a new economic order under the dominance of a single country. It was Nazi Germany in the 1940’s; it is the United States in the 1970’s. In brief, the war on gold that we observe today, and discuss below, is dollar imperialism, designed to maintain the U.S. dollar as the only world currency without competitors. The purpose is the formation of a world totalitarian state under Wall Street dominance.” (The War on Gold, Antony C. Sutton, 1976, p. 63)
Sutton’s view was limited because he had not yet discovered the Trilateral framework just created three years earlier in 1973. We can see now that the totalitarian state is still clearly in view, but the self-proposed rulers of this new arrangement will be members of the Trilateral Commission, and their monetary “enforcer” will be gold.
2008 Gold Hegemony
Bill Murphy is the chairman of the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA), which has asserted for almost 10 years that a concentrated gold cartel has been manipulating the price of gold. Murphy and GATA are highly regarded around the world on their work to expose this cartel.
On September 10, 2008, Murphy made an opening statement at the 2008 Las Vegas Hard Assets Investment Conference, reprinted in full below. Murphy’s perspective and argument does not include the Trilateral Commission, but the players in his narrative are largely members or former members of the Commission.
This leads this writer to connect some dots between 1973-1976 and 1998-2008.
In Murphy’s comments, note that the famous bullion banks of 2008 include Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Deutsche Bank, all of which have at least one director or senior official sitting on the Trilateral Commission. In addition, the players Murphy names are members of the Commission.
As Sutton did in 1976, to imply a “war on gold” necessitates an eventual victory, a victor and a loser. It is already painfully obvious that the citizens of America are the losers: The middle class is being wiped out and we all hold a debased paper currency that is headed toward destruction.
The question is, who will the winner be? And what is the victor’s intent over the conquered?
Bill Murphy’s Opening Statements
The Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee’s basic assertion for the past 9 ½ years is that there is a Gold Cartel out there suppressing the price of gold. It consists of the US Government, including the Fed and Treasury, various other central banks, and bullion banks like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase.
The motives of “the cabal” are to give support to the dollar, keep US interest rates lower than they should be, and to tone down the widely watched US barometer of US financial market health, that being the gold price. After all, whenever the price of gold soars, it congers up talk of too much inflation, a sinking dollar, or a crisis of some sort … all negative for Wall Street and the incumbent administration.
Therefore, “Shoot the Messenger” is The Gold Cartel’s key mission.
The suppression of the price of gold was the essence of Robert Rubin’s Strong Dollar Policy. What else did the US do to effect that policy? Talk? Jawbone?
It seems to have all started with Robert Rubin…
Before he was CEO of Goldman Sachs and then US Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin worked in London for Goldman Sachs. One of his duties was to oversee their gold trading operations. We know this because the CEO of Kirkland Lake Gold, Brian Hinchcliffe, a staunch GATA supporter, worked in London back then for Goldman Sachs and reported directly to Robert Rubin.
This was many years ago and interest rates in the US were very high, say from 6 to 12%. Rubin had Goldman Sachs borrow gold from the central banks to fund their basic operations. They could do so at about a 1 % interest rate. This was like FREE money, as long as the price of gold did not rise to any sustained degree for any length of time.
Soon other major financial institutions realized what GS was doing and copied them. Rubin continued these operations as the Goldman Sachs CEO and then took it to a new level as US Secretary Treasurer. That is how the gold price suppression became the lynchpin of his widely acclaimed “Strong Dollar Policy.” GATA’s Reg Howe caught on to this notion in a paper titled, “Gibson’s Paradox and The Gold Standard,” co-authored by Lawrence Summers in 1988. Summers, a professor at Harvard at the time, succeeded Rubin as US Treasury Secretary. The bottom line of Summer’s analysis is that “gold prices in a free market should move inversely to real interest rates.” Control gold and it will help to control interest rates.
Bullion banks such as Goldman and Morgan became The Gold Cartel’s hit men, trading the gold market from the short side and bombing the market in coordinated anti-trust fashion at the beck and call of our government, making a great deal of money in the process … as you have all witnessed the past couple of months.
In a brilliant piece a few weeks ago Ted Butler reported 3 U.S. banks held a short position of 7,787 contracts (778,700 ounces) of gold in July, and, astonishingly the same 3 U.S. banks held a short position of 86,398 contracts (8,639,800 ounces) in August, an eleven-fold increase. Gold then declined more than $150 per ounce once Secretary Paulson (note: Paulson is ex-CEO of Goldman Sachs) gave the order, just as he did in May 2006 when a similar order was given, according to a US Senator from the state of Washington. Both times, various bullion banks made vast amounts of money quickly as the US government facilitated their short positions by feeding considerable clandestine central bank gold into the physical market.
It was the concerted, concentrated action of certain BULLION BANKS, which tipped off GATA what was going on nearly a decade ago now.
It was this clandestine feeding of central bank gold into the marketplace which clued GATA into the gold price suppression scheme. Three GATA consultants, Reg Howe, Frank Veneroso and James Turk, using independent, sophisticated methodologies, came to the same conclusion years ago … that the central banks have far less gold than the 30,000 tonnes of gold they say they have. The GATA camp research shows they have less than half that amount in their vaults, the difference being the amount that has been fed into the physical market to suppress the price. Since demand for physical gold exceeds mine and scrap supply by well over than 1,000 tonnes per year, this central bank gold is vital to prevent the price from exploding.
GATA is not alone in recognizing the central banks are not accounting for their gold properly. GATA revealed an
ISSUES PAPER (RESTEG) # 11
TREATMENT OF GOLD SWAPS AND GOLD DEPOSITS (LOANS)
“14. Regarding the statistical treatment of gold swaps, its treatment should be consistent with that of other reverse transactions, as presented in paragraph 7 above. Thus, swapped gold should be excluded from both reserve assets and IIP (demonetization). This is a logical consequence, and overstating of reserve assets can be avoided. On the other hand, this results in a decrease in the financial assets of the monetary authorities.”
Gold swaps and gold leasing are at the heart of the gold price suppression scheme. For example, the US cannot sell its 8,133.5 tonnes of gold without an Act of Congress, but they could lease or swap it. In 2006 the President of the Bundesbank made an astonishing statement for a central banker: “We have been asked to negotiate with other central banks’ about potential swap deals involving gold.”
Is this stuff hush hush? I guess so. in January 1995, the Federal Reserve’s general counsel, J. Virgil Mattingly, told the Federal Open Market Committee, according to the committee’s minutes, that the U.S. Treasury Department’s Exchange Stabilization Fund had undertaken “gold swaps.” When the GATA camp had Kentucky Senator Jim Bunning inquire Alan Greenspan what that was all about, Mattingly came back and said the Fed testimony was GARBLED … Right…
Recently GATA filed Freedom of Information Act requests to the Fed and Treasury about US gold swaps. The Fed redacted 300 pages of information and refused to send another 400 pages. Now, think about it … if the US gold is, and has been, just sitting in our vaults, without a true independent audit since the Eisenhower Administration, what is their to withhold?
As for GATA’s request to the Treasury about any Exchange Stabilization Fund activity into the gold market, they answered in the negative by referring to the Exchange STABILITY Fund. Can they be that lame?
Is the gold price manipulated? You don’t need to read through GATA’s countless evidence to appreciate what is going on. It is on the public record…
beginning with Alan Greenspan’s testimony before Congress in 1998:
“Central banks stand ready to lease gold in increasing quantities should the price rise” … which is just what they have done!
The Reserve Bank of Australia confessed to the gold price suppression scheme in its annual report for 2003. “Foreign currency reserve assets and gold,” the RBA’s report said, “are held primarily to support intervention in the foreign exchange market.
Maybe the most brazen admission of the Western central bank scheme to suppress the gold price was made by the head of the monetary and economic department of the Bank for International Settlements, William S. White, in a speech to a
Barrick Gold, then the largest gold-mining company in the world, confessed to the gold price suppression scheme in U.S. District Court in New Orleans on February 28, 2003. On that date Barrick filed a motion to dismiss Blanchard & Co.’s anti-trust lawsuit against Barrick and its bullion banker, JP Morgan Chase, for rigging the gold market.
Barrick’s motion said that in borrowing gold from central banks and selling it, the company had become the agent of the central banks in the gold market, and, as the agent of the central banks, Barrick should share their sovereign immunity and be exempt from suit.
Is the gold price manipulated today? Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker wrote the following in his memoirs:
“Joint intervention in gold sales to prevent a steep rise in the price of gold (in the 1970s), however, was not undertaken. That was a mistake.” …
Robert Rubin and gang took heed … as are more and more in the mainstream financial world. Just last week, the highly regarded Don Coxe of the Bank of Montreal stated the following in an audio presentation last about recent market action to the bank’s clients:
“The Most Massive Intervention Of Government Into The Capital Markets, Or The Financial Markets, Since President Roosevelt Closed The Banks Back In 1933,”
It’s wake up time, finally.
Recently, there has been talk about the Working Group on Financial Markets (more commonly known as The Plunge Protection Team), which consists of the President, Treasury Secretary, and heads of the CFTC and SEC. Think about it … why are bureaucrats included in meetings about the markets except to look the other way regarding government intervention?
To give you an idea just how pervasive and insidious our markets have become, I bring your attention to the Counterparty Risk Management Group. Ever hear of it?
It consists of major players in the investment banking/hedge fund community in New York, including Goldman Sachs. Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Deutsche Bank (all defendants in GATA’s Reg Howe’s suit against The Gold Cartel in 2001). There are a number of other participants such as the famed hedge fund of Paul Tudor Jones.
On July 27, 2005, E. Gerald Corrigan, former President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and now a Managing Director of Goldman Sachs, wrote:
The Report of the Counterparty Risk Management
Policy Group IIAddressing it to:
Mr. Henry M. Paulson, Jr.
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Goldman, Sachs & Co.(all roads always lead back to Goldman Sachs)
He stated; “since we know that financial disturbances and even financial shocks will occur in the future, and we know that no approaches to risk management or official supervision are fail-safe, we also know that we must preserve and strengthen the institutional arrangements whereby, at the point of crisis, industry groups and industry leaders, as well as supervisors, are prepared to work together in order to serve the larger and shared goal of financial stability.”
This Orwellian shared goal of financial stability, which began with the serious rigging of the gold price under Robert Rubin, has led us to the financial market mess we have today. It is wrong and must be stopped!
Is the cat out of the bag?
In the 2007 May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, Benn Steil presented his paper, The End of National Currency. Steil is Director of International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. In his report, Steil stated,
“So what about gold? A revived gold standard is out of the question. In the nineteenth century, governments spent less than ten percent of national income in a given year. Today, they routinely spend half or more, and so they would never subordinate spending to the stringent requirements of sustaining a commodity-based monetary system. But private gold banks already exist, allowing account holders to make international payments in the form of shares in actual gold bars. Although clearly a niche business at present, gold banking has grown dramatically in recent years, in tandem with the dollar’s decline. A new gold-based international monetary system surely sounds far-fetched. But so, in 1900, did a monetary system without gold. Modern technology makes a revival of gold money, through private gold banks, possible even without government support.”
This is hardly far-fetched. Zbigniew Brzezinski noted in 1972 that “the nation-state as a fundamental unit of man’s organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state.”
Cracks in the dam
Noted Romanian economist, Professor Antal Fekete, released a critical report on December 5, 2008, entitled “Red Alert: Gold Backwardation.”
For the first time in history, gold futures sold below spot price and creates a potential crisis in gold delivery at the end of December. Fekete states,
“According to the December 3rd Comex delivery report, there are 11,759 notices to take delivery. This represents 1.1759 million ounces of gold, while the Comex-approved warehouses hold 2.9 million ounces. Thus 40% of the total amount will have to be delivered by December 31st. Since not all the gold in the warehouses is available for delivery, Comex supply of gold falls far short of the demand at present rates. Futures markets in gold are breaking down. Paper gold is progressively being discredited…”
“Gold going to permanent backwardation means that gold is no longer for sale at any price, whether it is quoted in dollars, yens, euros, or Swiss francs. The situation is exactly the same as it has been for years: gold is not for sale at any price quoted in Zimbabwe currency, however high the quote is. To put it differently, all offers to sell gold are being withdrawn, whether it concerns newly mined gold, scrap gold, bullion gold or coined gold. I dubbed this event that has cast its long shadow forward for many a year, the last contango in Washington ― contango being the name for the condition opposite to backwardation (namely, that of a positive basis), and Washington being the city where the Paper-mill of the Potomac, the Federal Reserve Board, is located. This is a tongue-in-cheek way of saying that the jig in Washington is up. The music has stopped on the players of ‘musical chairs’. Those who have no gold in hand are out of luck. They won’t get it now through the regular channels. If they want it, they will have to go to the black market.”
Conclusion
If Fekete is correct, and he has seldom been wrong, then the trap is snapping shut on who will own the gold in 2009. Free-market supplies of gold are drying up, but the price is being kept low as global institutions sop up whatever crumbs are left.
Several very serious implications can be drawn:
- The massive amounts of gold leased to bullion banks will ultimately be seized by these same banks as collateral against worthless paper loans made to the Central Banks.
- Central Banks (including the Federal Reserve) could well be left to disintegrate in order to give way to a single global central bank controlled and fueled by the bullion banks who have Monopoly control over the world’s gold.
- These superbanks are all closely tied to the goals and membership of the Trilateral Commission, whose members have methodically carried out a monetary policy designed to bring about this eventuality.
- For all practical intent, individuals will be frozen out of the gold market at any price.
Indeed, a global totalitarian state may be closer than we think; as the globalist’s golden rule states, “He who has the gold, makes the rules.”