One Step Closer to the End of the Yellow Brick Road

02. May, 2010 Categories: Economy by Aaron Emery 0 Comments

“She was so old that she dried up quickly in the sun… But the silver shoes are yours, and you shall have them to wear.” – the Witch of the North, from Frank Baum’s 1900 “Wonderful Wizard of Oz” (p. 6/72)

Well, Technicolor changed the unforgettable color of Dorothy’s shoes from silver to ruby red, but Baum’s work had multiple interpretations, including an allegory for sound money. The silver shoes danced on the “yellow brick road” made of solid gold to the Emerald City of Oz, where everything seen was faked through green glasses (the greenback or dollar) run by the little man behind the screen (the FED/Congress).

After watching the Chinese develop a voracious appetite for gold and silver over the last year before I left China to return home and run for U.S. Congress, one of the strange things I noticed after returning stateside was the non-stop newspaper and TV ads for unwitting citizens to bring in their gold and be paid a fraction of their worth. It was so bad that even The Onion picked up and satirized the whole event, suggesting the US government could pay off the national debt by selling our gold for irredeemable dollars.

“You are quite welcome to take my head off, as long as it will be a better one when you put it on again.” [said the Scarecrow].

So the Wizard… took up a measure of bran, which he mixed with a great many pins and needles… filled the top of the Scarecrow’s head with the mixture and stuffed the rest of the space with straw, to hold it in place.

When he had fastened the Scarecrow’s head on his body again he said to him, “Hereafter you will be a great man, for I have given you a lot of bran-new brains.” – from page 55/72

Of course, the plain truth is that governments – including America’s – have suppressed the price of gold in the past as seen by the London Gold Pool of the 1960s, and most assuredly are up to it again as I documented last July in “The Summers Gold Price Suppression Scheme.”

Gold is insurance to the reckless money-printing of the world’s central banks, and they have printed enough to drive interest rates to near-zero to temporarily stave off government debt default. The unfunded liabilities for the United States – per the government (p. 178/254) – for the Social Security and Medicare ALONE is $107 TRILLION.

While America burns, Congress is fiddling with such inane measures as the incumbent’s sponsoring of stringent controls on tanning salons. Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans living off of food stamps has more than doubled over the past decade. From 2009 to 2010 the figure has shot from 10% to 13%, and now 39 MILLION Americans are living on food stamps.

Gold is the world’s largest commodity market, trading over 16.5 million ounces per trading DAY on the London gold market alone, which is close to $20 billion USD per day. Adrian Douglas states the gold market dwarfs the oil market.

However, these LBMA “physical” gold contracts were recently revealed by Jeffrey Christian of CPM Group, formerly Goldman Sachs, to be mere paper backed by in essence roughly 1 actual physical ounce of gold for every contracted 100 ounces. A transcript is here, with this video below left.

GATA, the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee, has gathered an enormous amount of evidence over the past decade of interventions in the gold market. This 2005 video (above, right) of a GATA conference outlines their case.

“Your Silver Shoes will carry you over the desert,” replied Glinda [the Good Witch]. “If you had known their power you could have gone back to your Aunt Em the very first day you came to this country.” (p. 71/72)

As seen in “Does the FED Really Control Interest Rates?” the federal funds rate and 3-month secondary market T-bill interest rates have a nearly identical overlay and are both near-zero at present. The LBMA gold forward lease rate from 1990-2010 follows the same general pattern as the AM Fix cranks upward in dollar terms. The LBMA data is available here courtesy Darlene who downloaded the gold prices from here and the GOFO from here.