I have to say something up front. I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist. For one thing, there are so many different conspiracy theories that keeping track of them all would be a full time job.

And just like you, probably, I don’t want to think that the powers that be are getting away with exploiting us by doing things we don’t even know about or understand. Heck, the things we know about are bad enough.

For twenty years, after the price of gold peaked at $850 and then fell to about $400 a few months later in 1980, the price of gold drifted down to about $285 in 1998. Sure, there were ups and downs – no market is perfectly straight horizontally.

And I can’t say I paid much attention most of the time. I was being a lot of other things more relevant to my life and money.

However, I’d read a lot of gold bug and gloom and doomer writings in the late 1970s, so I did somewhat keep track of gold. Oh, and that’s also because I received a lot of sales letters through the mail for financial newsletters. A lot of them, especially through Agora and other similar published, promoted the idea that soon gold would return and go through the roof.

Yet, until 1999, it didn’t happen. And although gold has gone up to $1200 (as of this writing), that’s still not exactly through the roof.

I couldn’t help but notice something. Whenever gold did seem poised to break through its slump, something happened to stop it. And often the news said that was due to central banks selling gold. When they sell gold, that increases the supply on the market, decreasing the price thanks to the economic law of supply and demand.

I refrained from buying a metal so susceptible to political actions. I wondered if those central bank sales were deliberate actions to keep the price of gold down.

And I’m not the only one who thought that. In January 1999 some people formed the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA). They charge the central banks and large private banks of the world with a conspiracy to hold down the market price of gold, and filed a lawsuit under United States federal anti-trust law.

It was eventually dismissed, but Blanchard Coins (a well-known gold dealer) filed a suit against Barrick Gold and JP Morgan Chase & Co that made Barrick stop selling gold in advance for ten years.

GATA continues to promote and expose schemes to prevent a free market in gold. Their website at gata.org contains many articles relating to the market in gold and how it’s being kept down.

I’m not certain of the ultimate purpose of this, except I guess help gold’s price rise faster sooner so that gold investors make more money, and it attracts more investors, or to put the world’s currencies back on the gold standard.