Dubai Study Endorses GATA's Findings on Gold Market Rigging, Warns Oil Producers.

DALLAS -- A study published by a research foundation in Dubai has endorsed the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee's findings that Western central and commercial banks have rigged the gold market but have much less gold than they claim to have and so are vulnerable to rising demand for gold. The study recommends that the oil-producing countries of the Middle East diversify their ever-depreciating U.S. dollar holdings into gold.

The study, "The Role of Gold in the Unified Gulf Cooperation Council Currency," was written by Eckart Woertz, vice president of CFC Securities in Dubai, for the Gulf Research Center. It quotes the work of GATA's consultants, including Frank Veneroso, and predicts that the gold price suppression scheme of the Western banks will fail just as their similar scheme of the 1960s, the so-called London Gold Pool, failed when the drain on Western gold reserves became too great. Once the scheme fails, the study says, "it will be highly difficult and expensive to accumulate a gold reserve. This is especially true for central banks that have low gold reserves like those in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries."

The study concludes: "The paper dollar standard is a dead man walking. Its debt, accumulated over the recent decades, is too high to be effectively repaid. It will either default or be inflated to such an extent that it will not 'hurt' to pay it back. Therefore, the accrued imbalances in global finance and the inherent weakness of worldwide growth models that rely on a continuance of U.S. deficit spending are likely to usher in a serious crisis of currency systems in coming years.

"Gold will be a suitable means of asset protection and ultimate payment in such a scenario. It will preserve the wealth of individuals and central banks alike and will ensure important maneuverability for the latter."

GATA believes that the study is likely to have a profound influence on governments, banks, and investors in the Middle East and may accomplish there what the similar report by Sprott Asset Management of Toronto -- "Not Free, Not Fair: The Long-Term Manipulation of the Gold Price" -- is accomplishing in the West.

The Middle East's oil-producing countries are especially obliged to heed the Gulf Research Center's study because their economies are based on a wasting asset, oil, whose depletion will leave them with little more than sand if the payment they receive is substantially depreciated or defaulted upon. In exchanging a real asset for paper assets that represent only unpayable debts, oil-producing countries are at imminent risk of massive expropriation.

The study has been posted at the GATA Internet site here: http://www.gata.org/The%20Role%20of%20Gold%20Digital.pdf

GATA urges its supporters to publicize the study around the Internet and in communications with mining companies, investment houses, and news organizations.