A History of Rigged & Fraudulent Oil Prices (and What It Can Teach Us About Gold & Silver)

BY J.S. Kim, Benzinga

Below, please find an interview forwarded to me by Mr. Lars Schall of chaostheoren.de with oil expert F. William Engdahl. As always, whether you agree or disagree with Mr. Engdahl, his insight always presents perspectives given almost no coverage by the mainstream media. Much of the fraudulent and deceptive practices of big global banks that Mr. Engdahl discusses regarding the oil markets can be extended to other commodities such as gold and silver. Regarding his opinion on precious metals markets and whether the banking cartel's price suppresion schemes can be broken here, Mr. Engdahl opines, “The problem with precious metals is that the two major contenders against dollar hegemony, as you know yourself, China and Russia, have pathetically low reserves of gold in their central banks. If they were go to a bi-metal system, gold and silver, that could function. The Chinese, I believe, and perhaps also the Russians, could have substantial reserves of silver”.

However, I would be quick to point out that the “officially” reported gold holdings of China and Russia are likely erroneous. Since Iran was, until recently, able to keep information about massive gold purchases secret (that may suddenly make their sovereign gold reserves on par with those of the United Kingdom), since China was able to keep purchases that doubled its gold reserves secret for six years before information leaked regarding their gold holdings, and since the executive chairman of the precious metals consultancy GFMS, Philip Klapwijk, just acknowledged that the IMF's country specific reports on gold reserves is inaccurate, probably the safest assumption one can make about oil reserves, gold reserves and silver reserves is that no country is reporting honest numbers as every country scrambles to prepare itself for the second phase of the global monetary meltdown.

Though Mr. Engdahl only briefly touches on gold and silver price manipulation at the very end of this interview, the first step in breaking the criminal banking cartel's commodities rigging game that solely benefits them while destroying the wealth of the world's citizens is understanding of their rigging mechanisms. The banking cartel succeeds in creating “false” prices for commodities such as oil, gold and silver through their creation of bogus paper markets (futures, ETFs, etc.), in which sometimes a hundred times or more of the commodity is bought and sold in paper form than exists in real physical form. At the end of the interview, Mr. Engdahl states that he believes the petrodollar system can be broken quite soon by major players in the world economy today. I believe that the bogus gold and silver futures markets and bogus gold and silver ETFs can be destroyed as well in the future as long as people understand the rigging games executed in the gold/silver markets. The problem today is that the majority of people fail to understand these rigging games and that is why they have persisted as long as they have and why the world's elite bankers have built their wealth enormously in the past decade at the expense of almost everyone other citizen's well-being. For this reason alone, agree or disagree with Mr. Engdahl, the interview below, though very lengthy, is well worth your time if you truly wish to survive the next several years of economic chaos.

“We are in the Midst of an Epochal Tectonic Shift”

Given the fact, that the oil price attracts strong attention these days, it is more than just fitting to have a detailed conversation with one of the most prominent observers of the “black gold” business, F. William Engdahl. In the following exclusive interview, he discussed his views on the current oil price, the history of the oil interests in the 20th Century, the true aims of the “War on Terror,” and last but not least Peak Oil.

By Lars Schall

F. William Engdahl, born August 9, 1944 in Minneapolis, U.S.A., is an American-German freelance journalist, historian and economic researcher. He grew up in Texas, and after earning a degree from Princeton University in engineering and jurisprudence in 1966, and graduate study in comparative economics at the University of Stockholm from 1969 to 1970, he worked as an economist and free-lance journalist in New York and in Europe. His major topics of research are the geopolitics of oil. In addition to discussing oil and energy issues, he has written on issues of agriculture, GATT, WTO, IMF, politics and economics for more than 30 years, beginning with the first oil shock and world grain crisis in the early 1970′s.

He is the author of the best-selling book on oil and geopolitics, “Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order”, published 1992, revised 2004 (Pluto Press, London). From a review written by Myron Stagman:

“The distinguished economist and historian William Engdahl provides must reading with this book. A Century of War once again proves Santayana's dictum, ‘Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.' (And proves George Bernard Shaw's corollary, ‘We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.')

The theme running throughout the book is the ruthless corporate and governmental pursuit of the magic moneymaker, oil, and the unremitting subversion and wars to seize black gold. Engdahl describes the US and UK corporations and governments as international predators, occasionally as rivals (in earlier times), but normally as an axis of financial and military power bent on capturing the petroleum resources of the world.”

Moreover, Mr. Engdahl has written the following books:

- “Seeds of Destruction. The Hidden Agenda of GMO”, Centre for Research on Globalization Publishing 2007;
- “Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order“, Boxboro, MA: Third Millennium Press, 2009;
- “Gods of Money: Wall Street and the Death of the American Century”, edition. Engdahl, 2010.

With Century of War, Seeds of Destruction, and Gods of Money, Mr. Engdahl wrote a “trilogy of power” which followed the pattern that was once laid out by the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate of 1973, Dr. Henry Kissinger:

“Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.”

Mr. Engdahl belongs to the more widely discussed analysts of current political and economic developments, and his provocative articles and analyses have appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines and well-known international websites on economics and political affairs. Moreover, he is an Associate Editor and Research Associate of Michel Chossudovsky's Centre for Research on Globalization (www.globalresearch.ca). He has also spoken at numerous international conferences on geopolitical, economic and energy subjects, and is active as a consulting economist.

F. William Engdahl lives near Frankfurt am Main, Germany and may be reached via his website www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.

Mr. Engdahl, is the oil price by and large driven by massive speculation?

Mike Norman, the Chief Economist at the Wall Street firm John Thomas Financial (http://www.johnthomasbd.com), wrote to me in October of last year for example:

“Total NYMEX open interest in crude is 1.4 m contracts or about 1.4 billion barrels of crude. Daily volume of crude traded on NYMEX is over 1 billion barrels per day. Total daily global demand is only 83 million barrels per day. The amount traded on one single exchange is more than 10 times total daily consumption. It's a giant casino with prices being driven up by speculators and consumers having to pay more and more.” (i)

FWE: I wrote back in the 2008 period, when oil briefly spiked-up to $147 per barrel and Goldman Sachs was issuing client-advisories that it was going quickly to $200, and when JP Morgan was advising the Chinese government that China ‘buy all the physical crude you can get your hands on because it is going to $200,' at that point I wrote that roughly 60-70% of the price of oil then was pure speculation, manipulated by the GSCI, the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index. It's a perfect scenario that they have created on Wall Street to control the oil price irrespective of supply and demand (ii). I would just add that the crucial ingredient these days is not the NYMEX for the global oil price benchmark, but the ICE Futures in London.

Why do I say that? Because the ICE Futures is a daughter company of the International Commodity Exchange of Atlanta in Georgia, owned by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase etc. – the big oil banks that benefit enormously from the inside. There is absolutely no serious regulation of the ICE Futures. The British keep their hands off it, and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the CFTC, since 2006 under the “Commodity Modernization Act of 2000“ allows ICE Futures to trade energy futures without disclosure to CFTC in the U.S. market through London. So, in fact, it has deregulated and taken away from any government supervisory role the entire trade in energy futures, especially oil.

This is a rigged game. All you need now is a plausible event like this madman Gaddafi going berserk, or even a CNN perception of such, to then kick-off a snowball effect in the futures markets. These games are not sustainable over a ten year time, of course. Eventually it has to come back to supply and demand on some level, but the reality is that this is pure price and perception manipulation right now.

[ ... ]

I would like to talk with you about an important event in that respect. This was the oil shock of 1973/74.

FWE: Correct.

You figured out in your book “Century of War” that this event was politically intended by a club that met on a Swedish island in 1973. Can you share some light with us on this topic, please?

FWE: Sure, most happily. I had the fascinating pleasure of being invited personally by Sheikh Zaki Yamani in September 2000 to his annual retreat outside London. He has an energy center in London that he founded after Washington got him dismissed as the Saudi energy minister during the reverse oil shocks of 1986, where Yamani was quite opposed to U.S. State Department pressure on Saudi's monarchy. Yamani invited me because he had read the “Century of War” book – an Iraqi friend had given it to him. He called on me to give a presentation to this grouping of energy bankers from the City of London and oil men about what really happened in 1973. He introduced it by saying: “This is the only account that exists of what really happened in '73 when I was head of OPEC and Saudi energy minister. I lived through this and Mr. Engdahl has described it accurately.”

What happened is the following: There was a meeting – and some people might get scared off and say this is conspiracy theory, but I am in possession of the actual confidential documents that quite legally came into my possession by chance in Paris years ago: the protocol from the May 1973 meeting of the Bilderberg Group in Saltsjobaden, Sweden. I have the attendees list from the Hoover Institute of War and Peace in California, I have the facsimile of the American secretary to the Bilderberg about which guests would be invited including Henry Kissinger from the American side to this May meeting. And in there, if you make the calculation, they listen to a presentation and debate, and these are some of the most powerful people in Europe and the United States – hand-picked by David Rockefeller by the way. The heads of all the major oil companies, the Seven Sisters, were also in attendance. They talk about what amounts to a 400 per cent increase in the price of OPEC oil in the very near future. Of course, they do not give specifics, but they talk in the abstract.

The entire discussion was not how do we as some of the most powerful representatives of the world's industrial nations convince the Arab OPEC countries not to increase oil prices so dramatically. Instead they talked about what do we do with all the petrodollars that will come inevitably to London and New York banks from the Arab OPEC oil revenues. Henry Kissinger, who coined the term after the oil shock in 1973/74, talked about “recycling petrodollars.” And in fact what happened was – and this came directly from Sheik Yamani privately in a discussion with me at his home in 2000, he said: “I was sent by my King, the Saudi King, as a trusted emissary to talk with the Shah of Iran and asked the Shah why at the September 1973 OPEC meeting after the Yom Kippur war he was adamant about such a huge OPEC price increase as a permanent price.” And he said: “The Shah turned to me and said: ‘Tell His Excellency, the King of Saudi Arabia, if he wants to have an answer to that question, he must go to Washington and ask Henry Kissinger! (ix)” In other words, this was dictated to the Shah.

So this oil shock came two years after the free floating of the dollar, when the dollar was essentially falling like a stone, because the U.S. economy was starting to show major ruptures from the Post-World War 2 period when the U.S. industry was a world class leading industrial power and the gold reserves and everything else was in an ideal correlation to one another. The U.S. economy was coming into very, very severe structural problems in the early 1970′s. So the dollar was falling and the French and the German economies were really beginning to boom as was the Japanese economy, and certain elites connected with the money center banks in New York, I think, decided that it was time for a major shock to reverse the direction of the global economy, even at the cost of a recession in the American economy – that didn't concern them so much as long as they were in control of the money flows.

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