How to Unrig the Gold Market, According to GATA's Chris Powell

In an earlier post, I gave you a sneak preview of my interview with Chris Powell, secretary/treasurer at Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA). For 20 years now, Chris and others at GATA have made it their mission to expose collusion by international financial institutions to control the price and supply of gold.

Below are highlights from the interview. I have to say that during much of our conversation, my jaw was on the floor. I don’t want to say much more than that! Read on, and remember to share widely.

Tell us about GATA’s background and what it does.

GATA was founded in 1999 to expose and litigate against the longstanding Western central bank policy of suppressing the price of gold. At first we weren’t even sure if it was Western banks that were doing it. But after a year or so of research and investigation, we concluded that the bullion banks were operating surreptitiously as brokers for governments, giving cover to their intervention in the gold market. At the time, we had a law firm advise us that this rigging was very likely authorized by the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, as amended since then, and as such, there may not be grounds to sue the government directly over gold price manipulation.

We went ahead and filed suit in 2001 anyway, in the U.S. District Court in Boston. We had a consultant, a Harvard-trained lawyer and gold investor, who brought a case against the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), the U.S. Treasury and various bullion banks.

One particular hearing I attended that year produced a remarkable admission from an assistant U.S. attorney. In short he said that, while the government was not admitting to the complaint, it nevertheless had the power and authority to do all the things the suit complained of—manipulating the price of gold, in other words. I made a record of this admission and put out a press release. The lawsuit was ultimately dismissed by the judge on technical jurisdictional grounds.

Having lost a little hope of suing the government directly, we determined that the best course of action going forward was to try to publicize our findings. We’re convinced that the Gold Reserve Act gives the U.S. government, particularly the Treasury Department and the Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF), the unrestricted authority to intervene in and secretly rig any market in the world. Our work now is simply to expose this policy to as large an audience as possible.