Chris Powell: Canada, you're a rich country, so stop insisting on being poor

Remarks by Chris Powell Secretary/Treasurer, Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc. Stein-GATA Dinner, Toronto Sunday, March 1, 2026 Please forgive the lack of a French translation for my remarks. I took four years of French in high school and still don't know merde. But since we met here a year ago things have changed dramatically for the monetary metals. For much of the last year gold and silver have been more or less soaring. I think I know why. The violence of the recent rise in the monetary metals -- gold up more than 70% and silver more than 150% in a year -- typifies either the apocalypse or a short squeeze -- and massive naked short positions in gold and silver, short positions long encouraged and underwritten by Western central banks, are exactly what GATA has been complaining about for many years. Those shorts started to be called for delivery after February 2022 when the United States froze Russia's international foreign exchange assets. ... Dispatch continues below ... GATA gives heartfelt thanks to the financial co-sponsors of the dinner in Toronto it co-sponsored with mining company advocate Laura Stein on Sunday, March 1, at the Dynasty Chinese Cuisine restaurant in Toronto: Adyton Resources, Alaska Silver, Apollo Silver Blue Lagoon Resources Inc.,  Cerro de Pasco Resources, CPM Group, First Phosphate Corp., Honey Badger Silver,  Klondike Gold Corp., North Peak Resources, Power Metallic Mines,  Red Cloud Financial Services, Seabridge Gold, Scorpio Gold, Spanish Mountain Gold,  The Mining Investment Event, The National Investor Whereupon other governments and central banks as well as industrial companies began to realize that their assets in the Western financial system would no longer be secure unless they capitulated to ever more aggressive U.S. foreign policy. People outside the United States began to realize that their claims on gold and other assets in the Western financial system could not be relied upon. So they started to shift their assets into gold, which was to be kept in their own vaults, prompting the short squeeze, because most of the gold they thought they held at Western bullion banks was merely paper. That is, the gold didn't exist. The long-awaited scramble out of over-rehypothecated paper and into real metal had begun. The naked short position in gold and other commodity markets may have been first identified in 2001 by the British economist Peter Warburton with his essay “The Debasement of World Currency: It Is Inflation But Not As We Know It": https://www.gata.org/node/8303 Warburton wrote: “How much capital would it take to control the combined gold, oil, and commodity markets? Probably, no more than $200 billion, using derivatives. Moreover, it is not necessary for the central banks to fight the battle themselves, although central bank gold sales and gold leasing have certainly contributed to the cause.” Warburton saw that the major investment banks, often the enthusiastic tools of Western central banks, would help central banks suppress commodity prices with derivatives. The British businessman and gold mining entrepreneur Peter Hambro confirmed Warburton's assertion from his own experience in the gold banking business. In an essay written in 2022, "Don't Forget the Golden Rule: Whoever Has the Gold Makes the Rules" -- https://www.gata.org/sites/default/files/Hambro-07-04-2022.pdf -- Hambro called attention to the stunning increase of gold derivatives in the U.S. banking system and the use of those derivatives -- "paper gold" -- to suppress monetary metals prices and thus protect government currencies against competition. Hambro wrote: "Central banks have followed the Bank for International Settlements' instruction to hide the perception of inflation by rigging the gold market. Of course they cannot be seen to do this and they need cover. The only way to achieve the cover is by smashing the price of physical gold by the alchemical production of 'paper gold.'” Hambro continued: "With the help of the futures markets and the connivance of the alchemists, the bullion traders -- yes, that includes me, as I was deputy managing director of Mocatta & Goldsmid -- managed to create an unshakeable perception that ounces of gold credited to an account with a bank or bullion dealer were the same as the real thing. 'And much easier, old chap! You don't have to store or insure it.' Once investors swallowed this stupefying pill, it was easy to sell them gold that simply didn't exist." Last year under the pressure of the crackup in international relations, the gold and silver price suppression system fell apart conspicuously. Last year even the mainstream financial news organizations that have been striving almost as hard as governments and central banks to conceal gold and silver market rigging and price suppression felt compelled to report the trouble the Bank of England was having moving custodial gold out of its vaults and delivering the metal to its owners. A year ago in February the Bank of England actually held a press conference at which it tried to assure the world that all the custodial gold it had been holding for bullion banks was secure. The bank blamed “logistical” problems for its long delays in delivering it. You see, the Bank of England explained, actual gold is so darn heavy. That was in case you might not have figured that real metal is much harder to move around than the paper certificates issued against it and against metal that hadn't even been mined yet. The reporters at the Bank of England's press conference bit their lips and reported what they were told and loyally declined to ask embarrassing questions. Last April I briefly got more hopeful about mainstream financial journalism when I heard from a hero of the cause of the monetary metals and free markets, the Canadian mining entrepreneur Eric Sprott. Eric said he had been called by a reporter for the New York Times who wanted to interview him about the gold market as part of a big project the newspaper was undertaking. Eric told the reporter he didn't want to talk to a paper as crappy as the New York Times. He told the reporter to call me instead -- as if I felt any better about the Times.   But a job is a job and I spent a cordial hour with the Times reporter on the phone. I summarized gold price suppression for him. The Times reporter seemed like a smart and decent guy and I wished him well, but I also told him I doubted that he'd be permitted to get very far with the gold project. He said he was confident something would come from it. So when we were done talking I e-mailed him the comprehensive summary of gold market manipulation documents that is posted at GATA's internet site -- http://www.gata.org/node/20925 -- documents largely drawn from government's own archives, and I began sending him occasional GATA dispatches, the most important stuff. After a few months, having seen nothing in the Times resembling the promised big gold project, I e-mailed the reporter to ask whether his gold project was continuing or had been terminated. He replied that the gold project was still on his agenda but he had been diverted to a more pressing story from … east Africa. Of course I construed this to mean that, as I had expected, the Times had terminated the gold project for being too politically sensitive. But by the end of last year there was no overlooking the explosion in gold and silver prices. Now everyone in the gold and silver banking business knew the score and was acting accordingly, scrambling to exchange paper to take possession of real metal. The derivatives GATA long had complained about were blowing up, and gloriously. So we at GATA thought that our work might just be done. We began to think that with the gold price manipulation mystery solved, we could move on to other famous mysteries -- maybe UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster, the Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis, the Abominable Snowman, Jimmy Hoffa -- stuff where we might put our tin-foil hats to good use again. But then came the gold and silver market smashes of late January -- smashes that were not occasioned by anyone selling real metal but just by dumping more paper in the London and New York markets. We saw that the bad guys were still around and weren't going away yet, even as they were getting more desperate. Indeed, a few days ago Robert Lambourne, GATA's consultant about the Bank for International Settlements, which is headquartered in Basel, Switzerland -- the command post for surreptitious official intervention in the gold market -- reported that the tonnage of the bank's gold swaps had nearly doubled in January, from 56 tonnes to 106 tonnes. This indicated major new official-sector activity to restrain gold prices, activity like the smashes at the end of January: https://www.gata.org/node/24500 But the smashes no longer work for very long. A few years ago the smashes might keep gold and silver down for months. Lately they have been lucky to keep gold and silver down for a day. There also have been some favorable recent developments for the monetary metals, quite apart from the resumption of their upward trend in price. First President Trump nominated former Federal Reserve Board of Governors member Kevin M. Warsh to be the Fed's next chairman. I make no prediction as to what Warsh will have the Fed do with interest rates, but I welcome his appointment because, in 2009, during Warsh's first stint at the Fed, GATA had some dealings with him. Back then Warsh was acting as a sort of adjudicator of our freedom-of-information request to inspect the Fed's gold records. In a letter to our lawyer, William J. Olson of Vienna, Virginia, Warsh confessed that among the records the Fed was refusing to disclose to us were records of the Fed's gold swap arrangements with foreign banks. That is, the incoming chairman of the Federal Reserve acknowledged to GATA in writing in 2009 that the Fed had created mechanisms for surreptitious intervention in the gold market. So maybe we can induce a U.S. senator to ask Warsh about this during his confirmation hearing, and maybe mainstream journalists will have to strive even harder then to ignore the gold price suppression issue. And then, remarkably, on February 4 Canada's National Post published a story by its financial reporter, Gabriel Friedman, about the stunning rise in the gold price and about complaints of gold price suppression over the years, a story that quoted at length both Eric Sprott and me: https://www.gata.org/node/24471 Even more remarkably, the story reported that the National Post had actually sought comment from the Federal Reserve about complaints of gold price suppression, and that the Fed had refused to comment. Yes, the Fed refuses to answer questions about its meddling in the gold market. This may be all that any impartial observer needs to confirm that the U.S. government has been manipulating the gold market for decades. Reporter Friedman sought some balance for his story quoting Sprott and me, and since the Fed wouldn't provide it, he sought out a gold industry titan who is skeptical of complaints of market manipulation: David Garofalo, chief executive of Gold Royalty Corp. in Vancouver, a mine finance company. Garofalo told Friedman that gold market manipulation by central banks and their bullion bank agents is just "conspiracy theory." But, Friedman added, Garofalo said "he wouldn't completely write off” GATA's complaint about manipulation, confessing that he had never actually looked into the matter. "It's a rabbit hole," Garofalo said. Unfortunately there are so many other bigshots in the gold and silver mining sector who seem to believe that if they don't already know about something, it can't be true -- even if they have never tried to find out. When I thanked Friedman for pursuing the gold manipulation issue in the National Post, I told him that if he ever spoke with Garofalo again and if Garofalo ever would like to know what he's talking about, to tell him that GATA would be glad to invite him to come down the rabbit hole with us for a two-day guided tour, during which we would examine all the documents of official gold market manipulation, one by one, and then request Garofalo's judgment as to whether the documents are genuine or forgeries and whether they have been construed accurately or misconstrued. I added that mainstream financial journalists would be welcome to join us, though the documents often have been sent to many of them over the years, sometimes even handed to them, face to face, and repeatedly, without result. Ladies and gentlemen, and everyone else, don't look now, but tonight this lovely restaurant is the rabbit hole, and you're in it. So please consider this an opportunity to do something good for your industry, your country, and, really, for the world as well. Your industry, the monetary metals mining industry, has many people who are brilliant at finding and extracting gold and silver and other metals vital to civilization. Your industry is not so good at understanding its own products -- understanding that two of your products, gold and silver, are most of all money -- and, more than this, that they are the ultimate money, money without counterparty risk, eternal money. As such their prices are of supreme and even terrifying interest to governments and central banks. As GATA's documentation file shows, there is a long history of governments trying to control and usually suppress monetary metals prices to protect their own currencies and bonds. That has been changing lately as the international central bank and government coalition against the monetary metals has broken up in unprecedented resentment of United States imperialism, the foremost weapon of which is the U.S. dollar. Many governments and central banks now realize that the monetary metals are the only escape from the dollar and U.S. imperialism -- or the escape from anyone's imperialism. These governments and central banks now are acquiring all the monetary metals they can, sometimes reporting their acquisitions, sometimes not. But while many governments and central banks now want gold and silver to protect themselves with, they don't necessarily want their own people to be protected by gold and silver. If, as some of us expect, gold and silver prices are likely to go to the Moon, we may find the enemies of gold and silver waiting for us there -- waiting with windfall profits taxes, punitive increases in mining royalty requirements, and even mine nationalizations and confiscation of privately owned gold and silver. It would be a mistake to imagine that, in extremis, Western governments will necessarily be any less totalitarian than, say, China's, Russia's, Iran's, or North Korea's. Twenty-one years ago I tried to explore this point with the U.S. Treasury Department. I wanted to know what the department's position was on gold confiscation. I had to enlist my U.S. representative to compel the Treasury Department to respond to my repeated inquiries, but at last I got an answer from the chief counsel of the department's Office of Foreign Assets Control. The chief counsel of the Office of Foreign Assets Control told me that, pursuant to the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, upon a proclamation by the president of the United States, the department would consider itself to have the power to seize or freeze any gold or silver or any asset related to gold and silver: https://www.gata.org/node/5606   But the chief counsel urged me not to get too paranoid about this, because, he said, pursuant to the same statutes and upon a proclamation by the president, the Treasury Department would have the power to seize or freeze any damn thing it wanted to. Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Iranian ayatollahs, and Kim Jong Un couldn't have put their philosophy of government any better. Canada's own Emergencies Act confers similar extraordinary power on your government, as you might remember from the totalitarian impulses of your immediate past prime minister. Australian law provides for similar expropriations. A half century ago under a Labor government United Kingdom law provided for gold confiscation. The law was repealed but Labor is in power again and rapidly running the country down. That's why the only investment advice I can offer is to amass all the monetary metal you can and then find a safe planet to keep it on -- and when you find such a planet, please e-mail me at [email protected]. In the meantime it would be helpful if you tried to get your industry's nose out of the ground and more into politics and government. For why does Canada, a commodity-rich country, maintain no gold reserves? Imagine the increase in prosperity that would have accrued to your government, the mining industry, and Canadians generally in the last few years if your government had been buying and reserving some of the metal being mined and refined in the country? Why has Canada been behaving like many commodity-rich but underdeveloped countries in Central and South America and Africa -- rich countries insisting on being poor? I hope you will forgive such criticism from a friend -- indeed, a friend who is much obliged to you for reasons far beyond this event tonight. For GATA would not have gotten far in the last 26 years -- would not have succeeded in documenting Western gold price suppression policy and its crushing, imperialistic purposes -- if not for Canadians. When GATA, being politically incorrect in the extreme, was being shut out of financial, mining, and journalistic venues in the United States, Canadians were making room for us at forums here, as the National Post did the other day. Canadians in the gold and silver business also supported us financially -- and Canadians who determined that GATA was correct were mocked just as we were mocked as wearers of tin-foil hats. GATA's story may be the most politically incorrect and thus the most politically sensitive story in the world. For it is a story about the surreptitious control of the valuation of all capital, labor, goods, and services in the world. All capital, labor, goods, and services, and there isn't much more than that. GATA's struggle -- the struggle for free and transparent markets in the monetary metals -- is part of the broader struggle for democratic, accountable, and limited government, and, really, the brotherhood of man, the struggle for decent civilization and fairness. In that broader struggle Canada often has punched far above its weight and sometimes has sacrificed much. Please keep punching. To be in Canada again is wonderful for me. Thanks for coming tonight and for your kind attention. * * * Support GATA by purchasing Stuart Englert's "Rigged" "Rigged" is a concise explanation of government's currency market rigging policy and extensively credits GATA's work exposing it. Ten percent of sales proceeds are contributed to GATA. Buy a copy for $14.99 through Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Rigged-Exposing-Largest-Financial%20-History/dp/1651405204/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_2?keywords=rugged+stuart+englert&qid=1579708888&sr=8-2-fkmr1 * * * Help keep GATA going: GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at: http://www.gata.org To contribute to GATA, please visit: http://www.gata.org/node/16 Donations of $500 or more will entitle the donor to a 1-ounce silver round commemorating GATA's work: https://www.gata.org/sites/default/files/GATA-silver-round-front.png