Dear GATA:

I have to ask you something, as you may be among the few people I can trust. (At least I think you are people and not an Internet-derived scam.)

Am I imagining everything that's happening or have I just been brainwashed into believing it? Are the things that people like Andrew Maguire, Eric Sprott, and Egon von Greyerz say really true and factual or just hearsay and nonsense?

I can't believe my eyes -- and no regulators or others in authority are doing anything about it. Is this all a dream? Thousands of futures contracts dumped in the middle of the night to smash gold down?

Are you real? Is the stuff GATA has dug up and archived real?

I'm so mad I could strangle somebody. Please tell me this is all a joke and to walk away. This is almost worse than Nazi Germany.

-- D.C.
* * *

Chris Powell Secretary/Treasurer - GATA
Chris Powell
Dear D.C:

Yes, the totalitarianism here is far more effective because it is largely surreptitious.

Years ago I wrote that if the United States occupied South Africa militarily and stole everything and shipped it out of the country, at least South Africans would see and understand what was happening to them and who was doing it. But rig the currency markets and you accomplish the same looting and hardly anyone can figure it out.

As for the Nazis, their looting of occupied Europe was conducted mainly not as we imagine, by force of arms, but through the rigging of the currency markets. See --

http://www.gata.org/node/13644

-- which has the following passages.
As it turns out, controlling the currency markets generally long has been the most efficient mechanism of imperialism. There is much history of this.

Rigging the currency markets was the primary mechanism by which Nazi Germany expropriated occupied Europe during World War II. Expropriation by force of arms was actually only a small part of the Nazi conquest. The rigging of the currency markets -- that is, the gross distortion of exchange rates in Nazi Germany's favor -- turned every citizen of an occupied country into an agent of the occupation every time he used money.

This currency market rigging directed all production in the occupied countries into Nazi Germany and blocked any return flow of production. It enabled Nazi Germany to run without consequence the same sort of fantastic trade deficit run in recent years by the United States.

The United States learned all about the Nazi expropriation of Europe through currency market rigging because it was documented by the November 1943 edition of the U.S. War Department's monthly intelligence letter, Tactical and Technical Trends:

[http://www.gata.org/node/10457]

Nazi Germany's manipulation of currency markets is also described in detail in the 2005 history "Hitler's Beneficiaries" by Gotz Aly:

[http://llco.org/hitlers-beneficiaries-2005-by-gotz-aly/]
GATA knows Sprott, Maguire, and von Greyerz and they are all serious and credible people. But they don't know any more than GATA does how much real metal is available to the central banks for use in suppressing the gold price and how much they are willing to lose. And now that central banks are surreptitiously active in all futures markets and able to create infinite amounts of money and deploy it secretly everywhere --

http://www.gata.org/node/14385

http://www.gata.org/node/14411

-- defeating them may take decades longer. But eventually the rest of the world will pull the plug on the system, having recognized that it exploits them.

I may not live to see that day but younger people might.

Note that the bombing of the gold market last week as described by Maguire's interview at King World News --

http://www.gata.org/node/14643

-- did not happen in the middle of the night, as some bombings do, but at the market open in London. This sudden mobilization of huge amounts of paper gold in the futures market, like the sudden mobilization of huge amounts on April 12 and 15, 2013, wasn't retail trading -- it was plainly an intervention by a central bank or group of central banks.

The only encouragement I can give people in this respect is that the central banks no longer care about getting caught, that they now have to risk showing themselves to achieve their market-rigging objectives, which suggests that their position has gotten more desperate.

The regulators can do nothing when these market manipulations are undertaken by governments directly or through intermediaries. In both the United States and United Kingdom the government is specifically authorized by law to intervene secretly in any market in the name of defending the currency. In the United States the authorized agency is the Treasury Department's Exchange Stabilization Fund. In the United Kingdom it's the Treasury's Exchange Equalization Account.

Originally, back in 1934, when it was established, the ESF was authorized to trade only in gold and gold derivatives. Its enabling legislation, the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, was amended in the 1970s to authorize secret trading by the government in anything.

http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/international/ESF/Pages/esf-inde...

Governments figured all this out a long time ago and prepared accordingly to achieve absolute power over their people and other nations. But not one person in a million outside government has a clue about it. So GATA has a lot of work to do and we must press on even as many of our friends fall away in despair.

And yes, we're real, even if it's not quite as much fun as it used to be.