Subj: MONEY MATTERS: Howe/GATA Lawsuit Update- + My Essay Delayed + 3 Good Quotes
Date: 8/13/2001 2:10:25 PM Pacific Daylight Time
From: bw@jak.se (Boudewijn Wegerif)
To: Undisclosed-Recipient:;;

MONEY MATTERS --13 August 2001
Howe/GATA Lawsuit Update -
+ My Essay Delayed + Three Good Quotations
_______________________

Dear list member,

Former US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers will seek to have a gold price

fixing lawsuit brought against him dismissed in a Boston court on 9 October,
three days before he is installed as the new president of Harvard
University.

The full story, issued today by Business Wire, appears below. The action
against the Bank for International Settlements, the U.S. Federal Reserve and
Treasury Department, and several bullion banks has been brought by a
consultant for the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee, GATA, Reginald H. Howe,
a private shareholder in the BIS.

GATA was formed in January 1999, the same month that the world’s leading
bullion banks, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and ten others, joined together to
form a “Counterparty Risk Management Group” to, as they put it, “strengthen
risk management practices”. For six months prior to that, evidence had been
mounting that whenever the price of gold threatened to rise above $300 an
ounce the bullion banks moved in to knock the price back again, mainly by
selling gold borrowed at around 1 percent interest from central banks.

After the formation of the Counterparty Risk Management Group, the price
fixing became more obvious, and it has continued uninterruptedly to the
present day, with only one break through the $300 mark, which was quickly
suppressed by the gold cartel.

The practice has been very profitable for the banks and their principal
customers, through what is called the “gold carry trade” (see www.gata.org
for an explanation). More importantly, for currency speculators, it has
served to underpin the over-valued dollar.

-----
There will be an end to what William Krehm, the chairperson of the Canadian
Committee on Monetary and Economic reform, COMER, has rightly called the
“cannibalising of the real economy” by the “financial sector” – i.e., the
transnational bankers, currency and stock exchange speculators and gold
price manipulators.

In my last two postings I promised an essay on the solar, wind, water and
earth energy economies of regular renewal that we need to be thinking about
for when the love of money feast is finally over. The way things are going,
maybe that day will come before my essay is completed!

Seriously, I am making no obvious progress on the essay, beyond reading good
literature on the subject, and working with the inspirations arising from
that. I also have other commitments. So it looks as if the essay that I said
might take a week to deliver will more likely take a month, or more. The end
result will be good, I hope.

In the meantime, here are three relevant quotations from two past presidents
of the United States and the brother of a third. The first quotation is from
a recent posting to the Earth Rainbow Network e-group by the moderator Jean
Hudon – globalvisionary@cybernaute.com - the second was in an email from
Dick Eastman - eastman@wolfenet.com - and the third came from Larry
Morningstar – mana7@aloha.net .

1.
Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to Col. William F. Elkins on 21 November 1864:
"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes
me to tremble for the safety of my country. ... corporations have been
enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money
power of the country will endeavour to prolong its reign by working upon the
prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and
the Republic is destroyed."

2.
Franklin D. Roosevelt: "The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people
tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger
than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism –
ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any controlling
private power."

3.
Robert Kennedy, in a speech at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, on
6 June 1966: "It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that
human history is shaped. Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts
to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, s/he sends
forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million
different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which
can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."

In friendship,

Boudewijn Wegerif
Monetary Studies Programme**
Box 83, 669 22 Deje, Sweden
Tel: +46.552.10327

_______________________
DALLAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 13, 2001

According to a Business Wire release just received, Judge Reginald Lindsay
of U.S. District Court in Boston has scheduled for 3:30 p.m. Tuesday,
October 9, 2001, a hearing on the defendants' motion to dismiss the lawsuit
brought by a consultant for the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee, Reginald
H. Howe, against the Bank for International Settlements, the U.S. Federal
Reserve and Treasury Department, and several bullion banks.

The lawsuit alleges collusion by the U.S. government, the BIS, and the
bullion banks to suppress the price of gold.

The underlying issue at the hearing Oct. 9, according to Howe, will be
whether the U.S. Constitution and federal law may be enforced in a federal
court action challenging the authority of former Treasury Secretary Lawrence
Summers and other American officials, working in part through the Bank for
International Settlements, to conduct surreptitious gold price-fixing
operations.

"Wonderful news!" says GATA Chairman Bill Murphy, speaking from GATA's
headquarters in Dallas.

"Recent exposes by Reg Howe and James Turk, which can be read at
www.GATA.org, are devastating evidence that the plaintiffs have been
manipulating the gold price for the benefit of the few to the detriment of
so many, including the poor sub-Saharan gold producing countries in Africa,"
Murphy says.

In an essay published this week, "Gibson's Paradox Revisited: Professor
Summers Analyzes Gold Prices," Howe notes that Lawrence Summers, the new
president of Harvard University, co-authored with Robert B. Barsky and then
Harvard Professor Nathaniel Ropes an article entitled "Gibson's Paradox and
the Gold Standard" in the Journal of Political Economy (vol. 96, June 1988,
pp. 528-550). The article, which appears to draw heavily on a 1985 working
paper of the same title by the same authors, reveals Summers' expertise
regarding gold, gold mining, and the connections among gold prices, interest
rates, and inflation.

Howe notes in his essay: "The unusual and sharp divergence of real long-term
interest rates from inverted gold prices that began in 1995 suggests that
Mr. Summers found an opportunity to do some further applied research on
these matters during his tenure at the Treasury."

Howe goes on: "Around 1995, real long-term interest rates and inverted gold
prices began a period of sharp and increasing divergence that has continued
to the present time. During this period, as real rates have declined from
the 4 percent level to near 2 percent, gold prices have fallen from $400/oz.
to around $270 rather than rising toward the $500 level as Gibson's paradox
and the model of it constructed by Barsky and Summers indicates they should
have."

"Professor Summers was the youngest tenured professor in Harvard's modern
history. On Friday, October 12, 2001, in outdoor ceremonies in Tercentenary
Theatre, he will be formally installed as its 27th president, entrusted with
the job of leading the nation's oldest university -- where "Veritas" is the
motto -- into the new millennium. Three days earlier, in Courtroom No. 11 of
the new U.S. Courthouse on Boston Harbor, the search for the truth about his
interim service in the highest positions at the U.S. Treasury will resume."

The defendants in the GATA/Howe lawsuit are: the Bank for International
Settlements; Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Board of Governors of the U.S.
Federal Reserve System and a director of the BIS; William J. McDonough,
president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and a director of the BIS;
five major bullion banks, J.P. Morgan & Co., Chase Manhattan Corp.,
Citigroup Inc., Goldman Sachs Group Inc., and Deutsche Bank; and Lawrence H.
Summers, former secretary of the treasury, who by law exercised control over
the U.S.Exchange Stabilization Fund, subject only to approval by the
president.

CONTACT: Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee
Bill Murphy, 214/522-3411
Fax: 214/522-4432
LePatron@LeMetropoleCafe.com

Laura Wood, Business Wire/Dallas -- 972/458-9555, fax 972/458-7646

_______________________
** The Monetary Studies Programme prepares commentaries and study material
on the psychology and history of money. Through the Money Matters mailing
list, information is spread about monetary reform and the growing movement
for a positive economic future, freed from debt oppression and money making
for its own sake. The programme is sponsored by the Adult Education
Residential College, Folkhogskola Vardingeby, south of Stockholm, and works
closely with the members' owned, interest-free bank JAK (www.jak.se).

Administration: Johanna Heckscher, FHSK Vardingeby, 150 21 Molnbo, Sweden
Tel: :+46.158.23035 - e-mail heckscher.jarna@telia.se