Who is he: William (Bill) Murphy is chairman of the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA) the focus of which is to expose the manipulation of the gold price by what Murphy calls "The Gold Cartel." The Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee's basic assertion for the past 10-plus years has been that there is a Gold Cartel out there suppressing the gold price, which consists of the US government, including the Fed and Treasury, various other central banks and bullion banks like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase.
Bullion banks such as Goldman and JP Morgan became The Gold Cartel's active agents, trading the gold market from the short side and placing orders in coordinated anti-trust fashion at the beck and call of government, making a great deal of money in the process.
The mainstream gold world has fought against Bill Murphy and GATA's efforts and discoveries. Federal Reserve bankers have been instrumental in efforts to suppress the price of gold. That is their role in The Gold Cartel. But others play a part, too. Bill Murphy relates that a few weeks after opening his gold-oriented website LeMetropoleCafe.com, the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management was unable to fulfill its obligations. Bill Murphy claims they were "short" more than 300 tons of gold on a "carry trade" strategy.
Forced to cover, LTCM should have forced the price of gold up a good deal higher. Instead, Murphy claims, the big bullion banks (Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Chase Bank), also short, stepped in to provide the necessary precious metal and stopped gold's advances cold around $300 per ounce. The price action and reports from the Comex floor clearly show this is what happened.
GATA and Bill Murphy never stopped agitating for fuller disclosure of gold manipulation. On March 23, 2010, London gold trader Andrew Maguire went public with an email correspondence that took place between him and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Maguire was able to show that he forecast correctly certain price manipulations.
Maguire attended a hearing of the CFTC and placed his allegations on the record. At the same hearing, and inadvertently, Jeffrey Christian from CPM Group testified that the LBMA over-the-counter market is leveraged 100-to-1 in its gold trades. Such fractional reserve trading practices have skewed the gold price for decades and are part of the conspiracy that Murphy and GATA alleges.
Murphy also alleges that the gold cartel systematically feeds central bank gold into the marketplace to suppress its price. As of 2010, GATA, led by Bill Murphy's tireless efforts, is attempting to force the United States government to reveal, through the United States Freedom of Information Act, the true quantity of gold held in the US Bullion Depository at Fort Knox.
Background: Bill Murphy grew up in Glen Ridge, New Jersey and graduated from the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University in 1968. In Bill Murphy's senior year, Murphy broke all single season Ivy League football pass-receiving records and was Honorable Mention on the All-America Football team. Murphy went on to become the starting wide receiver for the Boston Patriots in 1968.
Murphy later entered the world of finance in the futures industry as a commodities broker. In his early years, Murphy worked for Shearson Hayden Stone and Drexel Burnham before starting up his own introducing brokerage on 5th Avenue in New York. In 1998 Bill Murphy opened up LeMetropoleCafe.com, a financial market website geared to the gold market.