“We’ve Got To Start Rigging The Gold Market”

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold[FDR1934].  If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.  - Alan Greenspan, “Gold and Economic Freedom” 1966

GATA has sourced a speech given in 1981 by the President of the BIS, Jelle Ziljstra, at the IMF headquarters in 1981 in Washington, DC in which he advocated Central Bank intervention in the gold market in order to control the price and prevent gold from competing with a global system which was based on paper fiat currency:

“I feel it is necessary for us, within the Group of Ten and Switzerland,consider
ways to regulate the price of gold…”  – Jelle Zijlstra

The “Group of Ten” are the Central Banks of France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada plus Switzerland.  As everyone knows, the BIS is the Central Banks of global Central Banks and therefore controls – de facto – global monetary policy.  Here’s a link  to the speech – there can be no questions that Central Banks – through their agent “bullion” banks (primarily JP Morgan, HSBC, Scotia, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Citibank, Barclays and UBS) – make a concerted effort to limit the upward price movement of gold.

That day the U.S. announced that the dollar would be devalued by 10 percent. By switching the yen to a floating exchange rate, the Japanese currency appreciated, and a sufficient realignment in exchange rates was realized. Joint intervention in gold sales to prevent a steep rise in the price of gold, however, was not undertaken. That was a mistake. – Paul Volcker, “Nikkei Weekly” Nov. 15, 2004 (original incident on February 12, 1973)

Below are couple graphs from the St. Louis Fed website, with my commentary, to put Zijlstra’s speech context.

You can read the rest of this here:  Investment Research Dynamics