There’s a story you haven’t yet read about in the popular press, and it concerns gold. As a matter of fact, we’re having a difficult time getting our hands around the topic ourselves.

First of all, how do you start to tell a gold story, without going into the background about what gold used to be in this (and most every other) country? Few people alive today remember that until 1933, gold was everyday money. People carried it in pocket or purse - it circulated everyday. You had the right, back then, to go down to your bank and withdraw your life savings in gold coins, if you wished.

In 1933, FDR took this country off the gold standard, and gold no longer circulated as money. At that time, gold was ‘called in’ and stored by our government in Fort Knox and other secure facilities, for it would be unthinkable that a powerful country wouldn’t have a store of the only international currency, gold itself.

So how has the U.S. come to the point of treating its national gold stockpile as so much forgotten, and perhaps obsolete, inventory, some faded vestige of a prior time, like the strategic stockpiles of mohair and molybdenum that were once maintained against the possibility of some future need? How did gold become so irrelevant and forgotten that we now have the Federal Reserve Board, in a parenthetical statement, casually asserting the authority to transact “gold swaps?” And how did some of the gold held by the Treasury come to be merely in our custody rather than under direct U.S. ownership? And, most astoundingly, why doesn’t anyone outside a small circle of gold traders, advocates, and investors, even seem to care?

Much of these discoveries stem from GATA’s lawsuit filed by Reg Howe on December 7, 2000. In this suit, Mr. Howe accuses Alan Greenspan, J.P.Morgan, the Bank for International Settlements, and a host of others, of conspiring to keep down the price of gold (we covered this lawsuit in an article on 12/11/00, which you can find in our Archives on this website)

We refer you also to some other sources about this story: Reg Howe’s website at www.goldensextant.com covers in great detail the lawsuit itself, and other aspects discovered since then. More detail is to be found at the website of the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee www.gata.org. Other views of this matter, particularly some astute commentary by Tim Wood, can be found at www.theminingweb.com.

We continue to have reservations about the goals and strategies of GATA’s crusade. But we must admit that the probings of GATA’s supporters and followers are starting to bear fruit. The recent discoveries about Treasury and Federal Reserve Board dealings which effect our national gold reserves, comprise a subject so large and complex that we’ll need more time to attempt to get it right. So please bear with us another week.

We’ll end this week with the quote from Reg Howe from which we drew this article’s title:

“The Anglo-American war against gold is being concealed from the American people by a bipartisan program of swapping lies -- first by Fed and Treasury officials with each other and then to members of Congress, who pass them along to their constituents. This procedure enables top government officials to avoid giving false public testimony before Congress while at the same time allowing the people's elected representatives to appear to be doing their jobs. But this stratagem notwithstanding, what official Washington wants to cover up may soon emerge as the greatest financial and political scandal in U.S history.” Reg Howe, August 1, 2001