There is not one asset that, over the decades and especially since the collapse of the gold standard, has received more claims of manipulation than gold. Yet evidence has always been impossible to come by. Are the interests imposing a gold price ceiling just too strong? If GATA's latest dispatch is correct, then yes, and they reach to the very pinnacle of modern financial oligarchy, represented by none other than the US Federal Reserve. GATA believes that the Fed has implicitly confirmed the existence of gold swap arrangements. As we all recall, the Fed issued nearly half a trillion in foreign CB liquidity swap lines whose primary reason was to make sure that foreign banks which were all massively short the dollar did not collapse, as the dollar skyrocketed into the end of 2008, after the capital markets became paralyzed and the dollar-short trade promptly became unwound. Could gold swaps be a comparable method for the Fed to explicitly permit foreign entities to keep gold prices low?

The other question of whether or not this confirmation needs an depth investigation over potential prior contradictory disclosure is left for the proper authorities. Of course, when it pertain to the Fed, there are no proper authorities. After all, the Fed is accountable to no one.

From GATA:

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

The Federal Reserve System has disclosed to GATA that it has gold swap arrangements with foreign banks that it does not want the public to know about.

The disclosure contradicts denials provided by the Fed to GATA in 2001 and suggests that the Fed is indeed very much involved in the surreptitious international central bank manipulation of the gold price particularly and the currency markets generally.

The Fed's disclosure came this week in a letter to GATA's Washington-area lawyer, William J. Olson of Vienna, Virginia (http://www.lawandfreedom.com), denying GATA's administrative appeal of a freedom-of-information request to the Fed for information about gold swaps, transactions in which monetary gold is temporarily exchanged between central banks or between central banks and bullion banks. (See the International Monetary Fund's treatise on gold swaps here:http://www.imf.org/external/bopage/pdf/99-10.pdf.)

The letter, dated September 17 and written by Federal Reserve Board member Kevin M. Warsh (see http://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/bios/board/warsh.htm), formerly a member of the President's Working Group on Financial Markets, detailed the Fed's position that the gold swap records sought by GATA are exempt from disclosure under the U.S.