Next I will directly address the previous question, that in answering provides the motive for and a fuller understanding of central bank gold price containment policy.
"Help me out here. I really want to know. Why do you think central banks care enough about the price of gold that they would want to suppress it? It is an honest question."
There are none better qualified than senior members of the US Federal Reserve to explain the significance of gold and its price to recent monetary policy. So I suggest spending a couple of hours reading through Adrian Douglas' summary of FOMC meeting minutes mentioning gold from 1978 to 1995, and published by GATA in 2010: http://www.gata.org/node/8429
Apart from the minutes, my favourite, and the most concise gold synposis as Douglas points out, comes from Alan Greenspan himself who wrote in 1966:
"This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard."
Just to be clear when Greenspan says 'gold' here he means the free market price of gold.
