In a brilliant essay yesterday, Money Metals Exchange CEO Stefan Gleason asked the compelling question: "When will gold and silver miners start believing in their product?"
Gleason wrote: "These businesses quite literally mine real money. But like nearly every other business or individual, they still seem to be stuck in the fiat currency paradigm."
Most gold and silver miners, Gleason noted, don't even reserve part of their production in their cash balances, preferring instead to sell their production for government currency almost as fast as they get it out of the ground.
The Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA) long has seen this phenomenon in a slightly different light, lamenting that few gold and silver mining companies acknowledge and agitate against government's constant if largely surreptitious market intervention to suppress monetary metals prices, intervention that supports government currencies against competition, intervention extensively documented by GATA here and here:
But GATA understands this negligence of the monetary metals mining industry. That is, the miners are too scared of their governments and their banks to acknowledge that they are competing with them in the money business.
Government can shut down a mine quickly on many pretexts -- environmental regulations, royalty rights, sovereignty claims, and such. And most mines are so expensive to build and operate that they require financing from the biggest banks, most of which are the partners of the government in market rigging.
So the World Gold Council, an international trade association, should be running interference for the miners in the war waged by the government against them. But the council itself seems to be an accomplice of the government and big banks, operating as if its main purpose is to make sure there never is a world gold council.
As a result little GATA has been stuck doing the work the World Gold Council should be doing, exposing the government policies and operations that aim to prevent the monetary metals from being fairly valued, to prevent the miners from making money, and to prevent the world from enjoying free and transparent markets and limited and accountable government.
The World Gold Council has an annual budget of many millions of dollars, drawn from dues paid by its approximately 32 member mining companies. In contrast, GATA's annual budget is small and irregular. But who has accomplished more for the cause?
If you think it's GATA, please consider helping us by contributing here -- and consider urging any mining company in which you have invested to help us as well.
About the Author:
Chris Powell is a political columnist and former managing editor at the Journal Inquirer, a daily newspaper in Manchester, Connecticut, USA, where he has worked since graduating from high school in 1967. His column is published in newspapers throughout Connecticut. He is also secretary/treasurer of the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc., (GATA) which he co-founded in 1999 to expose and oppose the rigging of the gold market by Western central banks and their investment bank agents.
