Bill Murphy is a former American professional football player, financial commentator, and the chairman and director of the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA), which was founded as a result of Murphy's essays on collusion among large financial institutions to suppress the price of precious metals. Murphy believes the price of gold is artificially low and has spent years lobbying the U.S. government to investigate market manipulation in the gold market. Earlier disregarded as a conspiracy theorist, his arguments were strengthened by a London precious metals trader who became a whistleblower and an American commodities trader, who inadvertently revealed that gold was leveraged 100 times physical.
Contents |
Born William J. Murphy III, he grew up in Glen Ridge, New Jersey and graduated from Cornell University in 1968. While in college, he played American football and went on to become a starting wide receiver for the Boston Patriots. He then went to work at Merrill Lynch as a trainee learning the commodities markets. He later worked at Shearson Hayden Stone and Drexel Burnham, eventually starting his own brokerage firm.[1] From 1993 to 1996, Murphy lived in Miami, Florida, where he was an entrepreneur[2] Murphy is now a financial commentator and operates a financial website for investors of gold.[3]
Murphy began compiling evidence and writing about manipulation of the gold market in the mid-1990s.[4][5] His claims about a gold cartel and market suppression were initially ridiculed as conspiracy theories[6] and discounted.[4][7] In 2008, the CFTC released a report in which they acknowledged that since the 1980s, they had received "numerous letters, e-mails and phone calls" alleging that prices in the silver market were being suppressed.[8] Murphy and GATA have gained recognition, but still have difficulty being covered by the mainstream media.[3]
On March 25, 2010, Murphy spoke at a hearing of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)[9] on position limits in precious metals markets. Murphy identified Andrew Maguire as the source of information on market manipulation in the silver market.[9] Maguire had contacted Adrian Douglas, a member of GATA's board, after Maguire was not invited to speak at the CFTC hearing.[10] The day after Murphy revealed Maguire as the informant who sent e-mails about fraud to the CFTC, Maguire and his wife were victims of a hit-and-run accident in London.[11][12]
Murphy's claims were also buttressed by an inadvertent admission by Jeffrey Christian, a former Goldman Sachs trader, who revealed that London bullion market over-the-counter trades of gold were 100 times the holdings of physical gold, meaning that each ounce of gold was being sold 100 times. Murphy and GATA have long claimed that the gold market was using fractional reserve practices.[7][13]
On April 29, 2011, Murphy appeared at an event hosted by the Deutsche Edelmetall-Gesellschaft in Munich, Germany. Billed as "An Evening with Bill Murphy", it was attended by 200 people from 15 countries.[3][14]