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?