The Journalist Behind the Spike Up in Gold

Politico.com has put out a bit of background information on Robert Fisk, the reporter who sent gold soaring and the dollar crashing as a result of his column reporting secret meetings between the Chinese, Arabs and Russians. They are supposedly meeting to design a basket of currencies to replace the dollar for international oil market transactions, according to Fisk.

Writes Politico.com:

Fisk is a legendary British foreign correspondent who has been based in Beirut for more than 30 years and has won a slew of journalism awards....he is one of only a few journalists to have interviewed Osama bin Laden (three times) and....he has expressed doubts that the United States has told the full story about the Sept. 11 attacks.

An analyst’s report from the Royal Bank of Scotland concluded, Fisk is a veteran of the Middle East. ... he is also increasingly associated with more radical theories thus weakening the credibility of the story.”

I've been reading Fisk for ages. He is a solid old school reporter. If he reports a story, he has it properly sourced, although because of the area of the world he chooses to play in, the Middle East, for obvious reasons he can not always go into details about who his sources are.

Politico.com is also pushing the angle that whoever leaked the story to Fisk did so because they wanted the price of gold to spike, that is a possibility.

But, again, Fisk is old school. It is just as likely he was sitting in a hotel bar in Beirut, or who knows where, when he ran into a banking contact he hadn't seen in years. After they down a few, the contact starts talking about the secret meetings. Fisk knows a good story when he hears one. Hangover, or not, he is up early the next morning banging out the story.

I tend to lean to this second alternative. Why? Because the story contained news that this was some kind of nine year plan. Anyone trying to hype gold would most certainly have left out that this was a nine year plan. They would make it sound like it was going to happen tomorrow.

All this said, whatever the reason for the column, it did spook holders of dollars and spike gold to record highs. If some dollars weren't in nervous hands, we would never have seen the sell off in the dollar. Now the question remains, how many nervous holders are there? Will short term selling of the dollar continue, with spiking gold, or have we just witnessed a short to medium term speculative blow off in gold?

If you can answer these questions, the pot of gold is yours for the taking.