Last week the European Commission announced that it was fining five big banks for rigging the international foreign exchange (Forex) market.
As many as 11 world currencies — including the euro, British pound, Japanese yen and U.S. dollar — were allegedly manipulated by traders working at Barclays, the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), Citigroup, JPMorgan and Japan’s MUFG Bank.
But manipulation is not just limited to the Forex market.
Last week LODE TV sat down with the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA) Chairman and longtime champion, Bill Murphy
For twenty years now, Bill Murphy and his colleagues at GATA have made it their mission to expose collusion by international financial institutions to control the price and supply of gold and silver.
Last week LODE had the chance to sit down with Bill Murphy to discuss how institutions manage to manipulate the price of gold and silver on such a global scale.
Murphy explained that it is largely in the futures market and in the London over-the-counter (OTC) market. The mechanisms are gold swaps and leases between central banks and bullion banks, and through the sale of futures contracts.
“We’ve been telling our story for the past twenty years and it is not getting any better,” Murphy said.
GATA was founded in 1999 to expose and litigate against the longstanding Western central bank policy of suppressing the price of gold. At first we weren’t even sure if it was Western banks that were doing it, Murphy said. But after a year or so of investigation, GATA concluded that the bullion banks were operating secretly as brokers for governments, giving cover to their intervention in the gold market.
So why would banks want a lower price on the metals?
“It’s quite simple really. Gold is looked at as a barometer of U.S. financial market health. When it goes up, something’s wrong, when it goes down, everything’s good. I mean Paul Volcker the former Fed Chairman said that.
And it has to do with the dollar and also interest rates and if gold goes up it’s bad for both United States financial people and people behind the scenes,” Murphy explained during the two-part interview.
And if the prices of both gold and silver were not suppressed, where does the GATA chairman feel they should be? Find out in the full interview here.
