That’s right fans, you heard it here first. The debate will be broadcast live.

Kitco will broadcast the debate at this week’s Silver Summit conference between GATA Chairman Bill Murphy and CPM Group founder Jeff Christian on whether the silver market is manipulated. You can watch some promotion of the program at Kitco here:  http://www.kitco.com/falltour2011/

Writing for MineWeb, David Levenstein of Lakeshore Trading in Rivonia, South Africa, has been persuaded by the attack on gold amid the Swiss franc’s devaluation that central banks are intervening surreptitiously to push the metal’s price down. Levenstein writes:

“With regard to the recent selloff in gold, I am absolutely certain that there is a great deal of truth to the commentaries that suggest that this selloff was engineered by central banks and their agents the bullion banks in an attempt to thwart the upward momentum in gold and thus take the spotlight away from the yellow metal.

“In a blatant attempt to drive the price of gold down, some large sell orders came onto the futures market during the time when the market was least liquid. You have to ask the question: Why would anyone sell at the most illiquid times? The seller was obviously determined to move the market in the direction he wanted and was not interested in the least in attempting to liquidate at the best possible price. Then, as the prices of equities, commodities, and most currencies plunged, it appears that certain hedge funds that were taking a beating in their stock positions used the profits made in gold and silver to cover those losses. This added to the downward momentum. The cherry on the top of the cake was the action taken by the CME. They hiked the margin for gold by 21 percent and in a falling market. Yet while the S&P plummeted, the CME reduced margins for this contract by 33 percent.”

Levenstein’s commentary is headlined “Politicians, Financial Regulators, Banking Officials, and Gold” and you can find it at MineWeb

Despite the world now beginning to wake up to Gov/Bank manipulation of precious metals and financial markets:

UBS AG was granted limited immunity related to an alleged conspiracy to manipulate the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR). LIBOR is a benchmark used to set short-term interest rates around the world. The Department of Justice (DOJ) is currently investigating banks that assist the British Bankers’ Association in setting the LIBOR, including Bank of America NA, Citigroup Inc. and Barclays Capital Inc. UBS also received limited immunity for conduct relating to attempts to manipulate the Tokyo Interbank Offer Rate (TIBOR), a short-term interest rate benchmark for the euro and yen calculated using bank submissions to the Japanese Bankers Association. UBS’s limited immunity only concerns the bank’s conduct with respect to the LIBOR and TIBOR and hinges on UBS’s continued assistance to regulators in the investigation. UBS has publicly stated that the immunity may also limit its civil liability to actual damages and not punitive damages. The European Union (EU), UK and Japanese antitrust regulators are also conducting similar investigations into bank manipulation of the LIBOR.

Could it be when the dust settles on the PM markets, the big offenders will walk with immunity?

GATA

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold (and Silver):

GATA’s Gold Rush 21 conference in Dawson City, Yukon Territory, in August 2005 marked an upward turn in the gold market, showing the world that Western central banks were suppressing the price of the monetary metal through largely surreptitious and even fraudulent means — but also that they would lose.

Now GATA plans to accelerate that realization by reprising Gold Rush 21 with a conference from Thursday-Saturday, August 4-6, in London, home of the London Bullion Market Association and the gold-dumping Bank of England, which now are fairly warned. The conference will review where gold has gone on GATA’s watch and examine where it might go as it returns to its rightful place at the center of the world financial system.

The Gold Rush 2011 conference in London will be held at the famous Savoy Hotel on the Thames River —

http://www.fairmont.com/savoy/

– and will feature many of the speakers from the Gold Rush 21 conference in Dawson City, plus some who have become sensations in the gold and silver world over the last few years:

– James G. Rickards, senior managing director for market 4-8-trans-intelligence at consulting firm Omnis Inc. in McLean, Virginia.

– London silver trader and whistleblower Andrew Maguire, whose complaint about silver market manipulation, presented by GATA to the public hearing of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission in Washington a year ago March, sent the price of silver soaring.

– Ben Davies, CEO of Hinde Capital, who has been making the case for gold and silver on financial news television programs throughout the world.

– Market Force Analysis editor and GATA Board of Directors member Adrian Douglas, whose research studies have documented gold and silver market manipulation.

– And Cheviot Asset Management Investment Director Ned Naylor-Leyland.

Speakers returning from Gold Rush 21 will include:

– GATA Chairman Bill Murphy.

– South African gold mining industry expert Peter George.

– Sprott Asset Management Chairman Eric Sprott.

– Sprott Asset Management Chief Investment Strategist John Embry.

– GoldMoney founder James Turk.

– Hugo Salinas Price, president of the Mexican Civic Association for Silver.

– Gold price suppression litigator Reginald H. Howe.

– Kirkland Lake Gold CEO Brian A. Hinchcliffe.

– Gold market analyst John Brimelow.

– Samex Mining Corp. President Jeff Dahl.

– And your secretary/treasurer.

Admission to the conference will be $800, which also will cover an opening night reception and some meals and refreshments during the conference. Starting in about a week, the Savoy Hotel will offer conference participants a special discounted daily room rate of £225 ($360 or so at the moment). We hope to offer some family outings in London as well.

Gold Rush 21 conference organizer Janet Lee has returned to organize the London conference.

The invitation to GATA’s London conference has been posted here:

http://www.gata.org/goldrush2011-london

For more information about the conference or to register, please write to:

LondonConference@GATA.org

We’ll let you know next week when room reservations at the conference rate are being offered at the Savoy.

We hope to see many of our old friends and to make many new ones in London.

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer

Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.

For more details on this case you can see the DGCMagazine special issue on GATA.

On Feb. 18, the last day allowed by a judge for the Federal Reserve to comply with her order, the Fed turned over to the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee, Inc. the minutes of the private April 1997 meeting of the G-10 Gold and Foreign Exchange Committee.

This document was one of several that were sought by GATA to gain more information on the actions of the Fed that involve gold swap discussions and activities since 1990. Although the judge in the suit permitted the Federal Reserve to keep nine other documents secret, she ordered that copies of this specific document be given to GATA by Feb. 18.

For several years, the U.S. government’s official stance has been that it has not only never engaged in manipulating gold prices, but also that it has never even discussed the subject.

According to GATA, “The minutes show committee members acknowledging the heavy involvement of central banks in gold leasing, with the British delegate estimating that a year’s worth of gold production already had been sold forward.”

Another section of the minutes reported that a U.S. delegate identified as “Fisher,” probably Peter R. Fisher who was then head of open market operations and foreign exchange trading for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, “explained that U.S. gold belongs to the Treasury. However, the Treasury had issued gold certificates to the Reserve Banks, so gold (by these means) also appears on the Federal Reserve balance sheet.”

About the risk of a rise in the price of gold, Fisher said, “So the net benefit to Treasury would need to be carefully calculated, since sales of government securities would expand the public portfolio of government securities and hence also expand the Treasury’s debt-servicing burden.”

This last statement gives the most important incentive that the U.S. government has for suppressing the price of gold. If expanding government debt led to concerns about the long-term value of the U.S. dollar, then the U.S. government would have to pay a higher interest rate on its debt.

Source: http://www.numismaster.com/ta/numis/Article.jsp?ad=article&ArticleId=18113

http://cambridgehouse.com/conference-details/vancouver-resource-investme…

GATA

At the conclusion of the conference, starting at about 5:30 p.m. Monday, the GATA delegation plans to be haunting the Lions Pub, 888 West Cordova St., just a couple of blocks away from the convention center, and hopes to meet friends there. Just remember that, while “in vino veritas,” coherence is something else.

Your secretary/treasurer and GATA favorites James Turk of GoldMoney, Hugo Salinas-Price of the Mexican Civic Association for Silver, London silver trader Andrew Maguire, and financial market analyst and journalistic provocateur Max Keiser, among others, will be speaking at the Cheviot Sound Money Conference in London on Thursday, January 27. Again admission is free but reservations are required. You can learn about the Cheviot conference here:

http://www.gata.org/files/CheviotSoundMoneyConferenceInvite.pdf

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

GATA today scored a small but perhaps auspicious victory over the Federal Reserve in our lawsuit seeking access to the Fed’s secret gold files. The judge presiding over GATA’s federal freedom-of-information lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Ellen Segal Huvelle, granted GATA’s motion to order the Fed to produce in complete form for the judge’s private review 20 gold-related documents the Fed has sought to keep secret. The judge ordered the Fed to deliver the documents by Friday.

Through its lawyers, William J. Olson P.C. of Vienna, Virginia — www.LawAndFreedom.com — GATA has argued that the Fed’s production of gold-related documents has been so inadequate and the Fed’s arguments for keeping them secret so weak that the court should review the documents acknowledged by the Fed and order the Fed to answer 25 questions from GATA about the Fed’s search for relevant information.

While Judge Huvelle still could grant at any time the Fed’s motion to dismiss GATA’s lawsuit, her ruling today at least implies a little skepticism about the Fed and its tactics. Combined with today’s statement by U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, the new chairman of the House Financial Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Monetary Policy (http://www.gata.org/node/9495), Judge Huvelle’s ruling gives hope that the Fed’s enormous secret power to rig markets and bestow the most fantastic patronage on a parasitic financial elite can be brought to account eventually.

The judge’s order to the Fed to produce documents for her private review can be found at GATA’s Internet site here:

http://www.gata.org/files/GATAFedLawsuitCourtOrder-01-10-2011.pdf

Those who are skeptical of GATA’s complaint that the Federal Reserve is part of an international gold-price rigging scheme should reflect on the meaning of the Fed’s refusal to disclose all its gold-related records, records that include gold swap arrangements with foreign banks:

http://www.gata.org/node/8192

If the U.S. gold reserves are just sitting somewhere, inert, unencumbered, and unused for surreptitious market intervention, what’s the problem with full disclosure?

Financial journalists unafraid of aggravating the world’s financial powers should start putting gold-related questions to the Fed and other central banks and stop simply assuming that secrecy should be the normal order of things with central banks and gold.

And people everywhere who believe in free markets in the monetary metals and who have not already supported GATA financially can join our struggle here:

http://www.gata.org/node/16

This struggle could have been undertaken easily and likely more effectively by the World Gold Council, which aims to represent gold mining companies and gold investors. But the council’s indifference to questions of surreptitious central bank intervention in the gold market has left the struggle to GATA. We need your help to pursue this struggle to victory for free markets, limited government, and a better, fairer world.

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.