Frank Veneroso is currently Market Strategist for the Global Policy Committee of Allianz Dresdner Asset Management and is responsible for alternative asset product development at Dresdner RCM. From 1991 to 1994 he was at the hedge fund Omega Advisors were he was the partner responsible for global investment policy formulation. From 1995 to 2000 and prior to 1991, through his own firm, Mr. Veneroso was an investment strategy advisor to global money managers and an economic adviser to institutions and governments around the world in the areas of money and banking, financial instability and crisis, privatization, and development and globalization of securities markets. His clients have included the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation, and The Organization of American States. He has advised the Governments of Bahrain, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Korea, Mexico, Peru, Portugal, Thailand, Venezuela and the United Arab Emerates. Frank is a graduate from Harvard and has authored many articles on the subjects of international finance.
Writes "Veneroso's View" — "a monthly report on gold, the commodity markets and the economic trends that impact them".
Bill Murphy is used to doing what most people consider improbable or even impossible. His contrarian approach to life has generated a career that has seen its share of success in fields as disparate as professional sports and commodities trading. Doing the impossible, or at least the improbable, seems to provide Bill with irresistible challenges and audacious triumphs.
Top football players don't usually go from Ivy League colleges to pro ball. Bill did just that - breaking all the Ivy League single-year pass-receiving records and then became a starting wide receiver for the Boston Patriots of the American Football League.
Those specializing in Hotel Administration (Bill's degree in college) don't usually end up trading commodities on Wall Street. That's just what Bill did, joining Merrill Lynch first, then joining Shearson Hayden Stone and Drexel Burnham before becoming affiliated with introducing brokers and specializing in commodity futures.
Successful Wall Streeters don't usually set up organizations to present evidence of a worldwide gold-manipulation and conspiracy. Bill has, though, as Chairman of the Gold Anti Trust Action Committee (GATA) which he co-founded in January 1999 with Chris Powell, a newspaper editor. GATA's objectives are to undertake litigation against collusion to control the price and supply of certain financial securities, particularly securities involving gold. Bill presided over the GATA African Gold Summit in Durban, South Africa in May 2001. The summit was attended by five sub-Saharan African countries, the South African Reserve Bank, South African labor unions, the South African Ministry of Mines and major South African press.
Bill is also the founder of the popular Internet site, Le Metropole Café, "where investors from all over the world can meet to discuss the vibrant economic and financial issues of the day. " James Michaels, former editor of Forbes Magazine, has written of the Metropole Café: "I'm no gold bug, but I get a charge from LeMetropoleCafé.com, a website that worships the shiny yellow metal. There's some … nifty bearish (on stocks, not gold) commentary from all over the world. These boys were really cheering when the price of gold spiked up …."
While jumping from an Ivy League school to a professional football league is a fairly improbable action - and transforming oneself from a retail financial broker into a commodities trader is at least equally farfetched, Bill's evolution into perhaps the number one critic of some of the world's most powerful financial institutions is obviously his most audacious makeover yet.
And like Bill's other transmutations, this one seems destined for fairly improbable success. When Bill started his criticism of United States; monetary policy, Gold was hovering around $250 and most people outside of a small circle of intensely bearish gold bugs would have written him off as a crackpot and a crank. Today, gold is near $400 an ounce, and Bill's Le Metropole Café has gained a reputation for monetary sophistication despite the often blunt "conspiracy talk" of the kind that most other successful financially-oriented sites steer clear.
Bill obviously couldn't care less about what other sites do, or what's acceptable in polite Wall Street society. His GATA Committee is relentless in its determination to ferret out the gross manipulation that Bill maintains has marred the gold market for at least a decade and maybe longer. In fact, GATA believes that it has fingered the culprit in the affair, the Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF) that, under the authority of the President and Treasury Secretary of the United States, "has been used to surreptitiously manipulate the price of gold."
Members of GATA have compiled what they consider to be pertinent evidence against the ESF, as well as information implicating the Federal Reserve in a scheme to artificially depress bullion prices. Accounting regulations devised by the IMF have also been scrutinized. GATA research draws mainly from government documents and other publicly available material.
While GATA has not yet embarked on any wide-ranging lawsuits concerning gold manipulation, its founders' determination to expose what it considers a "conspiracy" has fostered several actions against the U.S. government and affiliated entities. With gold rising, and GATA's focus on gold manipulation causing increasing controversy, Bill's educational and monetary goals are seemingly being met.
Is it an improbable, if not impossible challenge? Look for Bill
Murphy to take it on and emerge a winner.
NYT: "Like Mr. Sinclair,
William J. Murphy III is
also a Wall Street refugee. After a one-year stint in 1968 as a wide
receiver for the New England Patriots, he began a career as a
commodities trader, working for a number of firms, including Shearson
and Drexel Burnham. Convinced that the price of gold was being
suppressed by an unholy alliance between the central banks and major
investment banks, he formed the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee, known
as GATA, that seeks to publicize facts and assertions that support his
point -- namely that the gold reserves in central banks are
significantly overstated.
GATA for the most part is a one-man show -- Mr. Murphy, dressed in his
sweatsuit, perched in front of the computer in his home in suburban
Dallas. With his excitable manner and his outré theories about
gold, he
is generally thought to exist on the outer fringe of the gold-bug
movement. "
(This is the "Planet Wall Street" view. We'll see, within the
year probably, how fringy he is.)
Jim Sinclair is primarily a precious metals specialist and a commodities and foreign currency trader. He founded the Sinclair Group of Companies (1977), which offered full brokerage services in stocks, bonds, and other investment vehicles. The companies, which operated branches in New York, Kansas City, Toronto, Chicago, London and Geneva, were sold in 1983.
From 1981 to 1984, Mr. Sinclair served as a Precious Metals Advisor to Hunt Oil and the Hunt family for the liquidation of their silver position as a prerequisite for the $1 billion loan arranged by the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volker.
He was also a General Partner and Member of the Executive Committee of two New York Stock Exchange firms and President of Sinclair Global Clearing Corporation (commodity clearing firm) and Global Arbitrage (derivative dealer in metals and currencies).
In April 2002, shareholders of Tan Range Exploration approved the acquisition of Tanzania American International, a company controlled by the Sinclair family, for shares in Tan Range. Following this transaction, Mr. Sinclair became Chairman of Tan Range and now leads its efforts to become a gold royalty company.
He has authored numerous magazine articles and three books dealing with a variety of investment subjects, including precious metals, trading strategies and geopolitical events, and their relationship to world economics and the markets. He is a frequent and enormously popular speaker at gold investment conferences and his commentary on gold and other financial issues garners extensive media coverage at home and abroad.
In
January 2003, Mr. Sinclair launched, "Jim Sinclairs MineSet," which now
hosts his gold commentary and is intended as a free service to the gold
community.
Author: Jim Sinclair Dear CIGAs,
"You have my word I will
be here with you
until the day I feel gold has performed to the degree I am willing say
"Thank you, I am both grateful and satisfied." This will occur just
before what I consider the
top."
Warren Buffet
The article went further: “A continuing fall in the dollar ‘could cause major disruptions in financial markets. There could be unpredictable side effects. It could be precipitated by some exogenous event like a Long-Term Capital Management,’ Buffett says, referring to the 1998 collapse of a steeply leveraged hedge fund.”
Warren Buffett is strongly linked to the Rothschild banking syndicate, and Buffett brought Arnold Schwarzenegger to visit Lord Jacob Rothschild’s Buckinghamshire estate in 2002. Buffett’s dire warnings likely represent the sentiments of the Rothschilds and others in European financier dynasties dominating the New World Order overclass; those who hope to use a worldwide depression to seize assets, depopulate the planet of “useless eaters,” and create a unipolar biometric police state.
Within hushed circles on Wall Street, the impending dollar crisis has been long predicted. In a closed-door meeting in 2004, the chief economist at Morgan Stanley, Stephen Roach, predicted “economic Armageddon.”
The Boston Herald article reported Roach’s comments as follows: “His prediction: America has no better than a 10 percent chance of avoiding economic "Armageddon…Roach sees a 30 percent chance of a slump soon and a 60 percent chance that ‘we'll muddle through for a while and delay the eventual Armageddon.’"