Mike Gleason: It is my privilege now to welcome in Chris Powell, Secretary-Treasurer at the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee, also known as GATA. Chris is a long time journalist and a hard money advocate and through his tireless efforts at GATA he is working to expose the manipulation of the gold and silver markets. Through GATA's work over the years some important revelations have come to light, which quite honestly should concern everyone.

It's great to have him back with us. Chris, good to have you on again and how are you?

Chris Powell: Oh, very good, Mike. Glad to be here.

Mike Gleason: Well, Chris, before we get into other things please start by giving our audience a bit of background on your organization as some may not be familiar. What is GATA? How did you get started? And where do you focus your efforts?

Chris Powell: GATA is the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee. We got started in January 1999 to expose and complain about and, if we could, stop the manipulation of the gold market, which is done largely surreptitiously by central banks and their agents. Certain investment banks.

We originally thought that the suppression in the monetary metals prices was an ordinary market rigging scheme run by the largest participants in the markets, the banks. After we did a year or two of research we realized that gold price suppression is longstanding Western government and central bank policy going back many decades. It used to be implemented in the open through the gold standard and the London gold pool and mechanisms like that. Now it is implemented largely through the rigging of the futures and derivatives markets. The major participants in this rigging are the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department, the Bank of England, the Bank for International Settlements.

If you look closely through the government archives, the policy records, you can see this policy of gold price suppression is very plainly articulated. There's really nothing secret about it if you're ready to look for the documents. The problem is there're very few people who want to get into this issue because it would show that our market system is an illusion. That governments and central banks are really rigging not only the monetary metals markets, but they're rigging all markets and that in fact, we have a very elaborate government system of control of the prices of all capital labor goods and services in the world. It's really a totalitarian system and we just try to show people the documentation of it, urge them to raise questions about it and slowly push the world toward a free market system.

Mike Gleason: On that note, you guys have been at this a long time and the evidence just keeps piling up as to pervasive price manipulation in the metals markets. And to be fair, banks have now been caught cheating in a variety of markets – LIBOR, currency markets, mortgage back securities – you name it, they've rigged it. It seems like your job should be getting easier, but it isn't. Why is that? Why is it so difficult to get reform given the markets so clearly need fixing?