More Smoke from the Federal Reserve On Their Opaque Operations in the Markets

Lots of smoke, but not quite a smoking gun, since the Fed representatives can always come back and claim that they were speaking hypothetically, and that the information was being withheld IF it indeed exist.

This highlights the problem of proving something wherein another party has the ability to stonewall and hide their operations. If the Fed was more transparent, then this would not be an issue.

I have been looking into this issue for some time, and have concluded that there is indeed plenty of smokescreens coming out of the Fed on a number of fronts. Some seem legitimate, but many do not. The Fed seems to want its independence, but also a position of power that is integration to the political and administrative policies of the US, more properly the domain of the public representatives.

Perhaps it is more or less innocent, but it does highlight how utterly inappropriate the Fed will be as a choice for a 'super regulator' of the financial system, seeming accountable and forthcoming only when they feel like it.

If this proves to be true, Greenspan is guilty of lying in his testimony to Congress, and most likely Bernanke as well. The Fed would also be implicated in expropriating US assets for its own purposes of rigging public markets far beyond their charter, since gold is hardly a foreign currency these days. They may as well be manipulating the price of oil or corn or wheat to suit their financial engineering. The permission to swap gold which belongs, not to the Fed, but to the American people via the Treasury, can only be granted by Congress.

I have also concluded that the Obama team wishes to broaden the powers of the Fed because this provides additional centralized and opaque power to the federal government. Both the Democrats and Republicans in the US seem to favor this.

As a semi-private organization, owing its allegiance both to the government, but even moreso to its private owners, the Fed should not and cannot be seriously considered for broader powers over more markets. They are hopelessly conflicted in their various agendas and loyalties already.

Business Wire
Federal Reserve Admits Hiding Gold Swap Arrangements, GATA Says
September 23, 2009
09:30 AM EDT

MANCHESTER, Conn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- The Federal Reserve System has disclosed to the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc. that it has gold swap arrangements with foreign banks that it does not want the public to know about.

The disclosure, GATA says, contradicts denials provided by the Fed to GATA in 2001 and suggests that the Fed is indeed very much involved in the surreptitious international central bank manipulation of the gold price particularly and the currency markets generally.

The Fed's disclosure came this week in a letter to GATA's Washington-area lawyer, William J. Olson of Vienna, Virginia denying GATA's administrative appeal of a freedom-of-information request to the Fed for information about gold swaps, transactions in which monetary gold is temporarily exchanged between central banks or between central banks and bullion banks. (See the International Monetary Fund's treatise on gold swaps here.

The letter, dated September 17 and written by Federal Reserve Board member Kevin M. Warsh (here), formerly a member of the President's Working Group on Financial Markets, detailed the Fed's position that the gold swap records sought by GATA are exempt from disclosure under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.

Warsh wrote in part: "In connection with your appeal, I have confirmed that the information withheld under Exemption 4 consists of confidential commercial or financial information relating to the operations of the Federal Reserve Banks that was obtained within the meaning of Exemption 4. This includes information relating to swap arrangements with foreign banks on behalf of the Federal Reserve System and is not the type of information that is customarily disclosed to the public. This information was properly withheld from you."

When, in 2001, GATA discovered a reference to gold swaps in the minutes of the January 31-February 1, 1995, meeting of the Federal Reserve's Federal Open Market Committee and pressed the Fed, through two U.S. senators, for an explanation, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan denied that the Fed was involved in gold swaps in any way. Greenspan also produced a memorandum written by the Fed official who had been quoted about gold swaps in the FOMC minutes, FOMC General Counsel J. Virgil Mattingly, in which Mattingly denied making any such comments. (See here.)

The Fed's September 17 letter to GATA confirming that the Fed has gold swap arrangements can be found here.

While the letter, GATA says, is far from the first official admission of central bank scheming to suppress the price of gold (for documentation of some of these admissions, see here and here), it comes at a sensitive time in the currency and gold markets. The U.S. dollar is showing unprecedented weakness, the gold price is showing unprecedented strength, Western European central banks appear to be withdrawing from gold sales and leasing, and the International Monetary Fund is being pressed to take the lead in the gold price suppression scheme by selling gold from its own supposed reserves in the guise of providing financial support for poor nations.

GATA will seek to bring a lawsuit in federal court to appeal the Fed's denial of our freedom-of-information request. While this will require many thousands of dollars, the Fed's admission that it aims to conceal documentation of its gold swap arrangements establishes that such a lawsuit would have a distinct target and not be just a fishing expedition.

In pursuit of such a lawsuit and its general objective of liberating the precious metals markets and making them fair and transparent, GATA again asks for financial support from the public and from all gold and silver mining companies that are not at the mercy of market-manipulating governments and banks. GATA is recognized by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service as a non-profit educational and civil rights organization and contributions to it are federally tax-exempt in the United States....