6:13p ET Sunday, April 29, 2012

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

With his new study, "Dr. Zijlstra's Final Settlement: Gold as the Monetary Cosmos' Sun," appended here, our good friend the Netherlands economist Jaco Schipper of MarketUpdate.nl today adds substantially to the growing documentation of the Western central bank gold price suppression scheme.

Zijlstra is the late Dutch treasurer, prime minister, and central banker Jelle Zijlstra, in whose memoirs Schipper has found confirmations of that scheme, including a confirmation involving former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, whose involvement in gold price suppression often has been noted by GATA:

http://www.gata.org/node/10923

http://www.gata.org/node/8209

Zijlstra knew what he was writing about, as he served not only as president of its central bank but also, simultaneously until his retirement in 1981, as president of the Bank for International Settlements, where gold price suppression long has been a primary function:

http://www.gata.org/node/8773

http://www.gata.org/node/11012

http://www.gata.org/node/11257

As noted by Schipper, in his memoirs Zijlstra recounts repeated efforts by the U.S. government to discourage the use of gold as a measure of currency values and writes, "Gold is artificially kept at a far too low price."

Schipper also calls attention to Zijlstra's notation that central banks had begun to count as an asset not only gold but "an asset on an equal footing," apparently some claim to gold not quite in a central bank's own possession, perhaps the original form of the somewhat mysterious "gold receivables" that now reside on the books of many central banks, mechanisms of imaginary inflation of official gold reserves.

We welcome Zijlstra, if only posthumously, to the ranks of gold "conspiracy theorists," and will have a tin-foil hat engraved in his honor.

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.