Queen Elizabeth II is off to the Baltic States today and will spend a day and a half in Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn…back in Windsor Castle for the weekend. Estonians have a soft spot for Brits ever since troops and warships helped defend Estonia’s independence against the Red Army after the 1917 Russian Revolution. The others like us as well because we were one of the few EU Members to open our borders to workers from the Baltic States after enlargement of the EU. Lithuanians are Number Two from Eastern Europe working in Great Britain. The Poles fill the top spot.

To mark the Queen’s Visit to the Baltic here are some previously unpublished snatches from Creaky Tales. Several life-times ago in the Spring of 2004 I took myself off to Hersonissos on the Island of Crete for a few weeks and devoted my time to Creative Writing. I returned to Sweden feeling rather pleased with myself with 100 000 words-worth nestling inside my Dell laptop…lots of it Dialogue…and all of it Fiction. It may not be the Baltic States. But it is not that far away. Meet Connie…the real hero of these stories…as she greets her mortal enemy - the Russian.

‘The Russian’s father was a merchant seaman who started his watery career in Odessa. It then came to pass one lonely evening on the Island of Cyprus that he chanced upon a pretty young Greek girl. The details are obscure and the part played by the Soviet authorities onboard his merchant vessel shrouded in mystery. But nonetheless, it was in some such manner that the offspring of this fleeting liaison came to spend his formative years in Nicosia picking the pockets of the British legions garrisoned upon the island.

The first meeting between Connie and the Russian has become something of a legend on Rock Channel. The Homeric version goes something like this. “Hullo,” said Suomi Girl, “I’m Connie. I’m a Finn. I’m told you’re Russian. So take that!” It helps that both Finns and Russians drink to get drunk. On that at least they see eye to eye.

After a night of cheap vodka Connie and Vladimir were the best of mates. But the Russian still rubs his chin nervously whenever Finland is mentioned. And Connie continues to insist that the Russian gives Karelia back. Greek parentage and Cypriot residence cut no ice with our local Finnish ambassador. “Sort it, anyway!”

The Russian was always a little defensive about the Winter War of 1941. The Finns had clearly won but the Russian occasionally tried to claim a draw…‘like the Yanks in Vietnam’. But normally the subject at issue was whether the Finns played fair.

Apparently the Soviet Army had been at a disadvantage for two reasons. Firstly the Finns wore white while the Russians advanced into the snows of the frozen north bearing upon the long-suffering shoulders of their conscripts standard Soviet military-issue khaki. The upshot of this was that the Finns could see the Russians but the Russians could not see the Finns. The respective body counts duly reflected this fact.

Secondly it was the Soviet Army and not the Russian Army. Standard Soviet army policy required that officers and men should be of different ethnic origin. So on the odd occasion a Finnish Freedom Fighter was caught in the cross-hairs of a Soviet rifle, no bullet was fired because the eye behind the sights and the finger on the trigger were connected to a brain that responded to a different language to that of the officer issuing the order to fire.

The Russian was offering odds of three to two on Russia winning next time around. These odds were based on two ‘cast iron facts’. The Russian reasoned that any Viborg Treaty on the international status of Karelia would include a clause requiring both sides to wear khaki in future conflicts.

And the language problem had been solved…not by shooting soldiers with inadequate fluency in Russian…but by the simpler expedient of breaking up the Soviet Union into its constituent parts. “Except Chechnya!” mumbled Connie’s chaperone. The Russian responded in an emotionally charged Georgian dialect: “Da, da! Except Chechnya! Bastards! Mother-fucking Mafiosi!” Connie kicked Chaperone under the table and the subject was promptly dropped to permit fraternal drinking to resume.

Connie had taken the Russian up on his bet because her reasoning was rather different. According to Connie the Finns had gone soft in the head over the past sixty years. Voting to join the European Union was evidence of that. This would have dire consequences because the Finns would abide by the terms of the Viborg Treaty. The Russians on the other hand would cheat. “They would train polar bears to shoot Kalashnikovs at anyone speaking Finnish. They might even teach them to lob hand grenades into Finnish army camps. Microchips in the polar bears’ butts would give them all the geopolitical positioning data they needed for such dastardly deeds. Then there was Nokia.

Nokia had made the Finns too dependent on mobile phones. So on the first day of conflict the Russians would just have to disable the mobile phone masts. Then the Finns…like the Danes in the Hitler War…would roll over without a whimper. Unable to relay messages it would be all over by tea-time. Really quite a civilised way to have a war.

Just a pity about the retributions that would follow. Without a king, the Finns could not dispatch the brave fellow onto the streets wearing the Star of David as the Danes did in 1940 to confound their Nazi conquerors and save the lives of thousands of their fellow citizens. The Russian is presently devising a scheme for betting on body counts.’

From left to centre: Robert Zoellick, former US Trade Representative and Deputy US Secretary, former international advisor at Goldman Sachs, now international Vice-chairman and Chairman of its international advisory arm; Robert Steel, new US Treasury Under-Secretary, previously Goldman Sachs; Robert Rubin, joined Goldman Sachs in 1966, served as co-chairman and co-senior partner with Stephen Friedman 1990-92, Clinton’s Treasury Secretary 1995-99;

From centre to right: Josh Bolten, White House Chief of Staff, former Goldman Sachs executive director of legal and government affairs in London 1994-99; Henry Paulson, US Treasury Secretary previously Goldman Sachs chairman and chief executive; Stephen Friedman, former White House chief economist, previously Goldman Sachs co-chairman 1990-92 and chairman and senior partner 1992-94. Just one big happy family…with their fingers in the till.

In September 1999, in an attempt to bring order to the gold market, the European Central Bank and 14 member central banks signed up to the Washington Agreement which set limits to their gold lending and gold derivatives activities. The price of gold then shot up by $60 to over $325…way beyond what their system could handle.

Edward A. J. George, Governor of the Bank of England and a director of the BIS Bank of International Settlements, described the ensuing panic in a letter to Nicholas J. Morrell, then Chief Executive Officer of Lonmin Plc…a principal shareholder in Ashanti Goldfields Ltd.

‘We looked into the abyss if the gold price rose further. A further rise would have taken down one or several trading houses, which might have taken down all the rest in their wake. Therefore at any price, at any cost, the central banks had to quell the gold price, manage it. It was very difficult to get the gold price under control but we have now.’ Robert Rubin is an authority on Lord Keynes’ Gibson Paradox.

Six months prior to this agreement Boudewijn Wegerif had been party to the forming of the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee, GATA. For the past seven years GATA has been compiling evidence of a Gold Cartel led by the top commercial, investment and bullion banks…Goldman Sachs, J. P. Morgan and Chase Manhattan, Citibank and Deutsche Bank.

The Gold Justice pages on Boudewijn Wegerif’s What Matters website details this illegal anti-trust conspiracy to keep the price of gold down and the price of the dollar up. It seemed a good idea at the time.

Enron thought so too and spent half a billion dollars buying its way into the London Metal Exchange where it came unstuck…catapulting its Wall Street Worth from plus 80 billion dollars at it's peak to minus $13 billion when it went broke. Enron is rumoured to have sorely stretched the capacity of the Gold Cartel to manage the gold market when it sought to unwind its gold borrowings immediately prior to its corporate collapse. Big Bets means Big Busts.

Goldman Sachs is an investment bank…not a commercial bank…so it is not required to report its derivatives position to the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. This means that unlike JPMorganChase it is hard to know the derivatives exposures at Goldman Sachs. But there are suspicions that it may be of JPMorgan Chase proportions.

Before Cantor Fitzgerald disappeared under the rubble of the World Trade Centre on 9/11 it might have been possible to shrug this off. But there are persistent rumours that Goldman Sachs is in deep, deep trouble because of Derivatives Trading Losses over the past two years as the gold price has broken out.

This quote from Sherman H. Skolnickat on the Indymedia website is typical: ‘Goldman Sachs is reportedly in a sinking boat with Germany's huge financial ship Deutsche Bank and the worldwide bank octopus Bank of America. According to some bond and gold experts the Federal Reserve had to come up with 600 billion dollars to rescue this trio of bust financial players.’

Boudewijn’s position was that the Gold Price Manipulation would work its way through the whole financial system. It was the rotten core that would implode the derivatives market. He once remarked that if there were one thing he had learnt from following the money it was that ‘it leads to gold…and silver…always. At no point in history had mortal humans been psycho-spiritually able to handle the immortal precious metals non-idolatrously.’

He went further in his Notes for a Golden Future with a Silver Lining: ‘Gold is dismissed as just another commodity; no longer needed for exchange. This is folly. After God gold is the key to culture. Take gold out of the economy and you remove its heart. Take the heart out of the economy and culture is destroyed. As if in confirmation of a truth known to all psychologists, the gold that has been denied has been taken up by mean forces to serve greedy ends in a caricature of its first purpose.’ Didn’t John F Kennedy run into trouble relying upon America’s Best & Brightest?