(Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee) For some hours now the internet site Wall Street on Parade, operated by the indefatigable financial journalists Pam and Russ Martens, has appeared to be under a distributed denial of service attack.
While this may be merely a coincidence, the attack came soon after the Martenses revealed Friday that hundreds of billions of dollars appropriated by Congress and the president for “economic stimulus” purposes have been diverted by the Treasury Department to its secretive Exchange Stabilization Fund and used to buy euros, yen, and euro- and yen-denominated assets, among other things.
The ESF was created by the Gold Reserve Act of 1934 specifically for secret intervention in the gold and currency markets to “stabilize” the international value of the dollar.
Under amendments to the law, the ESF now is authorized to intervene in and manipulate any market in the world.
For years GATA has called attention to the ESF’s authorization to rig markets, including the gold market, but the Martenses’ report Friday appears to provide the first details about the fund’s recent operations.
Their report doesn’t prove that the ESF has used the “stimulus” money to knock the gold price down and support the dollar in recent weeks, but it is hard to think of any other explanation for the counterintuitive crash in gold even as the dollar was faltering.
In their report Friday the Martenses noted that the House Financial Services Committee is to hold a hearing on Wednesday, December 2, to question Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, and the Martenses said they would ask committee members to raise the ESF issue.
