On May 10, 2000 a GATA delegation consisting of Reg Howe, Frank Veneroso, Chris Powell and Bill Murphy met with Denny Hastert, The Speaker of the House in the United States Congress; Spencer Bachus, the Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Domestic and International Monetary Policy; and Dr. John Silvia, the Chief Economist of the Senate Banking Committee. We presented each of them our 100 page "Gold Derivative Banking Crisis" document and personally delivered it to the staff of every House and Senate Banking Committee member. It actually made the news on ABC television in Australia.
From www.LeMetropoleCafe.com [28] six days later:
May 16, 2000 - Spot Gold $275.30 down 20 cents - Spot Silver $5.11 up 9 cents
Midas Special
Dinner plans are with former Justice/Treasury Department attorney and Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee member, Ethan Stroud, this evening, so this MIDAS will be a shorter than planned…
GATA put out a press release this morning about the Roll Call open letter and our trip to Washington, noting that we met with Congressman Spencer Backus of Alabama. Congressman Backus is Chairman of the House Banking Sub Committee on Domestic and International Monetary Policy. This committee has oversight of the gold and silver markets and is the right place to go about our gold market concerns…
Allow me to let you in on some of the inside scoop going on here. Over the past year, the name Ted Truman has popped up in our circles as a CIA snoop. That is also the word around certain politicos in Washington. Rumor mind you, but smoke all over the place on this one. He used to work for the Federal Reserve, but he had a falling out with Alan Greenspan. Al Gore picked him to go work at the Treasury which is where he is employed at the moment. After one of our meetings in Washington, we met with one of GATA's support contacts and told him the names of who we met with. Immediately, he told us to be careful with one of them because he has a direct line to Ted Truman.
That sets the scene.
Yesterday, I almost fell off my chair when GATA Treasurer/Secretary Chris Powell faxed me of a copy of a letter he just received from none other than Ted Truman! It was dated May 10, the day of our meetings in Washington. We did not get out of our meeting that day until
3 o'clock. Chris Powell had written letters to the Treasury many months ago as had others in his behalf. I just looked in our files and found the following correspondence:
A letter that was sent to Senator McConnell of Kentucky from Jeffrey Rush Jr., Inspector General of The Treasury.
A letter to Dale Schnitzler and Congressman Sherrod Brown of Ohio from Marti Thomas, Acting Assistant Secretary of The Treasury.
A letter to Congressman Charles T. Canady from Linda L. Robertson, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury.
A letter to Senator Christopher Dodd (with "concerning questions from Mr. Chris Powell." written in the letter) from Michelle A. Smith, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury.
Two letters to Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers from Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut.
A letter to Senator Lieberman from Alan Greenspan in response to GATA's Roll Call questions.
All this, but no letter from Secretary Summers to anyone, not even to Senator Lieberman. Secretary Summers had everyone else put their name down. But, NOT HIS.
At the same time, there was plenty of correspondence to Chris Powell over these past many months by other Treasury officials in response to his request for answers to the questions that GATA posed in the Roll Call open letter.
It is very odd then that this supposed CIA snoop (with the proper name of Edward M. Truman) with the Treasury writes to Chris Powell
after obviously being immediately informed about we said at one of our presentations in Washington. The letter itself was a form one that
most others received except for one difference. It started out, "Secretary Summers has asked me to respond on his behalf." I cannot help but think that Secretary Summers is the ringleader of the US gold trading operation, having taken over from former Treasury Secretary Rubin. The evidence is starting to mount. If that is the case, and Congress finds this out, it could open up a can of worms and who knows what else Congress will find?
The Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee and our supporters in the GATA delegation could be the Democrats worst nightmare, maybe Tony Blair's too.
-END-
As for Tony Blair, he was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom when the Bank of England announced a very controversial decision to sell
400 tonnes of gold at around $275 an ounce, which was close to the bottom of the market. Nearly a month ago Ned Naylor-Leyland, investment director of Cheviot Asset Management in London, interviewed by Max Keiser on yesterday's edition of "The Keiser Report" on the Russia Today television network, revealed that the British Broadcasting Corp.'s investigative journalism TV program, "Panorama," killed a report exposing silver market manipulation even after doing substantial interviews that provided evidence of manipulation by JP Morgan, etc.
GATA knew all about the Panorama TV program due to GATA’s Adrian Douglas being involved. Word was that it was a call from Tony Blair which killed the airing of the show. It begs the question to ask why and reveals just how big a deal the precious metal market manipulation story really is. The story won’t die there. (And it didn’t with this discovery)…
From the Daily Mail:
PUBLISHED: 12:51 EST, 16 September 2012
Tony Blair has taken a £4.2million loan secured against his family home from the US bank he advises, it emerged yesterday.
The former Prime Minister received the seven-figure mortgage from JP Morgan, which pays him £2.5million a year for his advice…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2204154/Tony-Blair-takes-4-2m-lo... [29]
-London-des-res-U-S-bank-advises.html
-END-
A decade later, Mr. Truman surfaced again…
ft.com
October 12, 2010 2:01 pm
America should open its vaults and sell gold
By Edwin Truman
Gold is back in the news. Its price is soaring in what some analysts say is a reflection of a weak economy and a lack of confidence in government policies. Naturally, investors are looking at a new sure thing in the expectation that prices will continue upward. My advice to the US government, however, is that this may be the best time – to sell. Doing so would help President Barack Obama and Congress reduce indebtedness, at little cost…
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/2bbd4dbe-d5fe-11df-94dc-0 [30]
0144feabdc0.html#axzz2GknfM8SL
-END-
Which has now led to this stunning revelation by R.M. and my colleague Chris Powell in this GATA missive…
Washington Agreement is another gold rig, former Fed and Treasury official admits
Submitted by cpowell on 09:01AM ET Tuesday, January 1, 2013. Section: Daily Dispatches
12:12p ET Tuesday, January 1, 2013
Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
Coordination of European central bank gold sales under the Washington Agreement on Gold, an agreement made in 1999 and updated in 2004 and 2009, is "the modern counterpart" of the London Gold Pool of the 1960s, which controlled gold prices until it collapsed in March
1968, a former Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury Department official told an international investment conference a month ago.
The former official, Edwin M. Truman, went on to describe an enduring system of daily communication among Western central banks in which they share "confidential information" that includes "the size, currency, and nature of their foreign exchange market operations."
Thirteen years ago as assistant treasury secretary for international affairs, Truman denied in a letter to GATA that the Treasury Department was involved in manipulation of the gold market. But he did not volunteer any awareness of gold market manipulation from other
sources.
Ironically, in his presentation to last month's investment conference, sponsored by the Bank for International Settlements and the World Bank and held in Washington –
http://www.bis.org/events/pic2012.pdf [31]
Truman, now a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, urged greater transparency for central banks and sovereign wealth funds and seemed to argue that they should not resist devaluation of the U.S. dollar. Truman cited the work of two colleagues at the Peterson institute who last week published a report blaming the U.S. trade deficit on currency manipulation by foreign central banks and advocating dollar devaluation:
http://www.iie.com/publications/interstitial.cfm?ResearchID=2302 [32]
Of gold market rigging in the 1960s and today, Truman said: "Participants, a subset of the G-10 countries, cooperated in feeding gold into the London gold market to help keep the price close to $35 an ounce. The modern counterpart of the gold pool is the agreement among the central banks of some of these same countries to limit their market sales of gold. But that agreement, which currently runs through 2014, does not extend beyond a small group of countries."
A detailed description of the London Gold Pool is posted at Wikipedia here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Gold_Pool [33]
The European Central Bank's most recent statement about the coordination of central bank gold sales is posted here:
http://www.ecb.int/press/pr/date/2009/html/pr090807.en.html [34]
Of secret coordination of Western central bank currency market interventions, Truman noted "the establishment at the BIS in 1962 of the Gold and Foreign Exchange Committee of the G-10 central banks," adding, "At regular monthly meetings, participants exchanged views on
conditions in gold and foreign exchange markets as well as their own operations. These discussions involved extensive sharing of confidential information. Later on these same central banks began regularly to participate in daily telephone calls in which they discussed, and exchanged information on, financial market developments including the size, currency, and nature of their foreign exchange market operations."
But Truman's presentation to the BIS-World Bank conference seems to have been mainly a lament that the United States is losing control of the world financial system as huge dollar foreign exchange reserves are held opaquely by foreign central banks and sovereign wealth funds and the U.S. government can't keep track of them and know where they may be used to strike next. He says more cooperation with international "public-sector investment policies" is needed and warns that "the alternative to increased cooperation on public-sector
investment policies is a currency war."
Of course given his biography --
http://www.piie.com/staff/author_bio.cfm?author_id=122 [35]
-- the greatest blow for transparency in the currency markets might be struck simply by strapping Truman himself onto a witness stand somewhere and putting him under oath. Wikipedia quotes New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman as having described Truman as "the George Smiley of international economics" --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_M._Truman [36]
-- George Smiley being the British intelligence officer of the John LeCarre spy novels. Ever since Truman manifested himself during a GATA delegation's visit to U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert and other members of Congress in Washington in May 2000, GATA Chairman Bill Murphy has been describing Truman as a Central Intelligence Agency asset.
Truman's presentation to the BIS-World Bank conference, acknowledging that gold market rigging continues through the Washington Agreement on Gold, is posted at GATA's Internet site here:
http://www.gata.org/files/Truman-WorldBank-BIS-12-03-2012.pdf [37]
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
* * *
The evidence is mounting about The Gold Cartel price suppression scheme almost every week now, in every way imaginable, including the way gold and silver have been trading. What is it going to take to get the mainstream gold world press to deal with the truth so that the gold price suppression scheme can be exposed and stopped?
Bill Murphy
Chairman
Gold Anti-Trust Action Comittee