Economist Mundell says China should buy all IMF gold

Submitted by cpowell on 08:03AM ET Saturday, October 18, 2008. Section: Daily Dispatches

10:54a ET Saturday, October 18, 2008

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

Your secretary-treasurer was given a fair amount of time Thursday night to explain the gold price suppression scheme to the annual fall dinner meeting of the Committee for Monetary Research and Education (www.CMRE.org) at the Union League Coub in New York City.

It was a good crowd, about a hundred people, mostly from the financial industry, and it enjoyed the unscheduled attendance of Robert Mundell, the Nobel Prize-winning economist from Columbia University who is regarded as inventor of the euro (http://www.robertmundell.net).

The CMRE always has been a gold-friendly group and the questions from the people in the audience suggested that they were more interested in gold's prospects right now than in anything else.

Mundell had a couple of notable things to say about gold. First, that China, with its huge dollar surplus, has a great interest in buying gold to hedge its dollar exposure but is unlikely to do anything disruptive to the world economic order. Second, that if the International Monetary Fund really does sell its gold, as is occasionally proposed (and you may recall that I doubt that the IMF has any gold at all, just a tenuous claim on the gold reserves of the United States; see http://www.gata.org/node/6242), China should purchase all of it. Since Mundell is officially an adviser to the Chinese government, presumably it already has heard this suggestion from him. If the IMF really does have any gold and China is prepared to buy it all, of course this would prevent that gold from depressing what passes for the gold "market."

A man in the audience who identified himself as a Comex gold trader asked how he could protect himself against U.S. government intervention to obstruct delivery of gold due on the December contract. I replied that unfortunately the only defense against such lawlessness by the government might be the Second Amendment.

Walker Todd, a mainstay of the CMRE, a moderator of the dinner's speaking program, a research fellow for the American Institute of Economic Research (www.aier.org), and former assistant general counsel and research officer for the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, remarked at length to the meeting about the plausibility of the gold price suppression scheme, which was much appreciated.

Several longtime GATA supporters from around the New York area and the country attended the meeting, and it was great to see them.

I'm especially thankful to CMRE's president, Elizabeth Currier, for this chance to bring GATA's case to some thoughtful and influential people.

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