Bernanke to appear before the banking committees

GATA congressional appeal update: Only PERSONAL contact has a chance

Submitted by cpowell on Sun, 2010-02-21 02:06. Section: Daily Dispatches

9:09p ET Saturday, February 20, 2010

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

Here's an update to today's dispatch about Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's appearance before congressional committees next week. It involves making personal contact with congressional staff members on Monday. E-mail to general congressional office e-mail addresses will almost certainly be ignored.

As you may have seen from the Bloomberg News story dispatched to you previously today,(http://www.gata.org/node/8352), Bernanke is to appear before the banking committees of Congress to present the Fed's semi-annual report on the economy. Presumably Bernanke will be subjected to the usual questioning by committee members. The problem, of course, is that these questions are seldom very compelling and so elicit little about the Fed's secret, market-manipulating actions.

With your help, we can change that next week.

After all, what if a committee member asked Bernanke about the Fed's gold swap agreements with foreign banks, agreements the Fed admits having and insists on keeping secret, agreements about which GATA is suing the Fed for access under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act?

Of course Bernanke might weave, dodge, and evade such questions, but then the issue would be squarely on the table.

These are the key questions for Bernanke:

1) Will you confirm the substance of Fed Governor Kevin M. Warsh's letter of September 17, 2009, to the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee, to the effect that the Fed has gold swap agreements with foreign banks and insists on keeping those agreements secret? (For a copy of Warsh's letter, see http://www.gata.org/node/8192.)

2) What is the purpose of the Fed's gold swap agreements?

3) Have any of these agreements ever been implemented? If so, exactly how, why, and when?

4) How do those agreements affect the U.S. gold reserves?

5) Why must the Fed keep these agreements secret? What would happen if the public, the markets, and Congress knew what the Fed was doing in the gold market? Will the Fed disclose those agreements to Congress? If not, why?

If you're a U.S. citizen, you can help put these questions to Bernanke and thus hasten the end of the gold price suppression scheme by urgently contacting your U.S. representative and U.S. senators and asking them to see that Bernanke is asked about the gold swaps. You especially can help if your U.S. representative or either of your U.S. senators is a member of the House Financial Services Committee or the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, the committees that will question Bernanke directly.

You can find a list of members of the House Financial Services Committee here:

http://financialservices.house.gov/members.html

A list of the members of the Senate Banking Committee is here:

http://banking.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=CommitteeInformati...

You can identify and locate your U.S. representative here:

http://www.house.gov/

You can identify and locate your U.S. senators here:

http://www.senate.gov/

For this to have a chance with Bernanke's testimony next week, you'll have to try to reach your U.S. representative and senators on Monday. This is probably best done by contacting congressional staff members by telephone, explaining your request, and then obtaining the staff members' fax numbers or e-mail addresses and sending the request to them in writing that way. If you already have a personal connection with a congressional staff member, contact him or her whichever way seems best.

But please do NOT try to contact congressmen by any general e-mail address listed for them or their offices. That e-mail gets little or no attention. You'll have to make PERSONAL contact with congressional staffers on Monday. Don't be reluctant; most congressional staffers are pretty good about constituent service. Just stress the urgency of your request when you get a staffer on the phone.

Please do try. All it will take is one member of Congress to raise the gold swaps issue with Bernanke during the hearings. Thanks for your help.

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