The NY Times Tries To Demonize Gold

By Dave Kranzler

Right now it is $1,390 an ounce, but before the events in New York and Washington it was $280 an ounce,” he wrote. He added, “If the price of gold reaches $1,500 or a little over before you get this message, it’s still all right to buy it. – NY Times quoting Bin Laden

Some of you may remember back in like 2003 or 2004 when gold’s move up was starting to catch the eye of the mainstream media and CNBC’s Bob Pisani made the comment from his theatrical perch on the floor of the NYSE that “gold is the currency of terrorists.”

The mainstream media has an obsession with demonizing gold.  It’s the metal of terrorists; it’s a pet rock; you can’t eat it;  it doesn’t pay interest…and now the NY Times is connecting the ownership of gold with Bin Laden.  Why even bring this up?   Bin Laden has been dead since 2002 (kidney failure) 2011.

Of course, the NY Times has morphed into little more than a propaganda mouthpiece for the elitist interests that control it.  In that regard, the NY Times article associating Bin Laden with gold ownership reflects the growing concern of the elitists over the slow but steadily growing interest in precious metals ownership by the public.

But the U.S. Government’s policy of eradicating the legitimacy of gold as currency goes back the 1970s.  Discussion and education about gold as a currency was systematically eliminated from the educational system in the early 1970s after Nixon removed any connection between fiat currency and gold.

As an economics major in undergrad (1981 – 1985), I took some financial economics courses.  Gold was never mentioned.  I studied financial theory at the U of Chicago B-school (1989 – 1991) from the same professors who wrote the finance textbooks I used in undergrad.  No mention of gold in any respect, not even for historical perspective.

Now that gold’s long term bull market is beginning to re-emerge, articles which disparage if not vilify gold are appearing in  “respectable” mainstream media publications like the NY Times and Wall Street Journal.

But if gold is no big deal, how come the Fed refuses to answer any inquiries about its dealings on gold:  “Smith then asked Dudley whether the Federal Reserve has swapped gold with the governments or central banks of other countries. Dudley replied:  “‘I can’t comment on individual customer kind of transactions.’”  GATA.org

Perhaps if the NY Times et al. were interested in digging up real news about gold, these publications would looking into the dealings by the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve with respect to the 8,100 tonnes of gold allegedly held in storage at Federal Reserve vaults. If gold is no more than a “pet rock” that “just sits there doing nothing” (Warren Buffet’s comment about gold) why is the Fed intentionally non-transparent with respect to its trading activities in gold?  After all, the Fed publishes daily disclosures about its trading activities in its U.S. dollar fiat currency.

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These are of course rhetorical questions.  In fact I would suggest that the anti-gold propaganda will increase in direct correlation with the next leg up in the gold bull market, which began in mid-January.   After all, a properly informed and educated public is dangerous to the Government…

Would the New York Fed respond with such contempt to a similar inquiry from, say, The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Reuters, Bloomberg News, or the Financial Times? The possibility of such critical and specific questioning about the Fed’s surreptitious intervention in the markets probably does not worry Fed officials in the slightest. At least such questioning has never happened before.  – GATA

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You can read more from Dave Kranzler at his site InvestmentResearchDynamics.com