imho the best review of gata's work to date, page-31

Holy crap you guys can be vindictive.

The BBI call was out of order, why is that relevant?

I am just asking questions because this all fails the common sense test, and that article really sounds like your common conspiracy theory.

Can we talk about the velocity of money and it's importance to inflation/deflation? Do we know that the current credit crisis has decreased the velocity of money due to falls in asset prices and the slow down in credit creation? At lease our central banks have the ability to print money to correct this. If they didn't print money, we would have found ourselves in great depression type deflation, a horror scenario. Gold was the standard then, why didn't it save everyone?

Did we know that the business cycle has been the most stable since the abolition of the gold standard? Being able to devalue your currency is one of the most important levers a central bank has...it puts them in a more competitive export position.

Nobody answered my question about how these "bullion banks" keep on borrowing gold. Where does it come from? All I heard was "do some more research", and "have a look outside". Why doesn't the borrow rate increase? If there was so much buying pressure, it would surely be eventually overwhelmed?

Also the borrow rate is calculated from the cost of carry from the lender. If the lender and borrow have equal costs of financing and storage, there is no "carry" trade. Can anyone explain this?

Informed rebuttals only, no insults please.

Gold is a store of value. It is nothing in itself apart from a rare metal that can't be replicated.

It's only use is investment. Check the uses of gold...over 70% goes to investment uses (ETFs mostly). It only goes up because everyone believes it should go up. Central banks hold much less gold than they used to.

Apart from the inability to arbitrarily print new money (which I don't think is a bad thing, but whatever) what's the difference between paper and gold?

I do find it funny that he got brass knuckle punched in the face. Haha yes this is exactly how the bullion banks get rid of the people trying to end their massive conspiracy!