A long memorandum written in March 1974 by a U.S. State Department official for Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and copied to future Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, then the Treasury Department’s undersecretary for monetary affairs, describes the desire of the United States and its options to prevent European countries from increasing the use of gold in the international financial system.
The memo, titled “Gold and the Monetary System: Potential U.S.-E.C. Conflict,” was recently discovered in the State Department archive by GoldMoney Vice President John Butler and brought to GATA’s attention this week by GoldMoney research chief Alasdair Macleod. It emphasizes the longstanding U.S. government policy of subverting gold as a reserve currency in favor of the Special Drawing Rights issued by the International Monetary Fund, an agency then and now largely controlled by the United States.
The memo’s author, Sidney Weintraub, deputy assistant secretary of state for international finance and development, wrote:
“To encourage and facilitate the eventual demonetization of gold, our position is to keep the present gold price, maintain the present Bretton Woods agreement ban against official gold purchases at above the official price, and encourage the gradual disposition of monetary gold through sales in the private market.”
“An alternative route to demonetization could involve a substitution of SDRs for gold with the IMF, with the latter selling the gold gradually on the private market, and allocating the profits on such sales either to the original gold holders or by other agreement.”
This post was published at GATA
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