Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
Gold swaps undertaken by the Bank for International Settlements fell slightly in June, from 146 to 144 tonnes, GATA consultant Robert Lambourne reported today after the bank's statement of account for June was published:
https://www.bis.org/banking/balsheet/statofacc260630.pdf
The swaps, a measure of surreptitious central bank intervention in the gold market using the BIS for camouflage, had fallen to a historically low level in 2025 but began increasing substantially in January this year, apparently as one or more central banks needed to mobilize real metal to slow or reverse what had been a spectacular rise in gold's price.
The BIS long has refused to explain its involvement with gold swaps -- their objective and their counterparties -- but, confident that mainstream financial news organizations will never pose any critical questions, it has advertised to potential central bank members of the bank that its services include secret interventions in the gold and currency markets, interventions mainstream financial news organizations will never report:
https://www.gata.org/node/11012
According to Lambourne, the gold involved in the BIS swaps is believed to be held by a commercial bullion bank -- probably as a custodian of a gold exchange-traded fund -- and is swapped for dollars via the BIS, probably on behalf of the U.S. Federal Reserve, which then can apply the gold in the markets as necessary to influence prices.
If Lambourne is correct, anyone who invests in a traditional gold exchange-traded fund like GLD in the hope of gold price appreciation is actually helping to sabotage free-market pricing in gold, buying a claim on metal that he cannot ever possess and that, on any particular day, maybe be, to put it politely, vastly oversubscribed in pursuit of price suppression.
The steady decline in BIS gold swaps in recent years may correlate with bullion bank JPMorganChase's having become co-custodian of the gold claimed to be held by GLD, which may have become another source of metal for U.S. government intervention.
Since ordinary shareholders of GLD cannot redeem their shares for actual metal -- a right restricted to the big bullion bank "authorized participants" associated with the fund -- it may be relatively easy for JPMorganChase and other bullion banks to juggle claims to GLD gold that add up to more metal than the ETF actually owns or thinks it owns, thus perpetuating the gross "rehypothecation" of gold in the market.
JPMorganChase long has been vaulting and trading gold surreptitiously for many central banks and thus has been at the center of market manipulation:
Here are the monthly BIS’ gold swap totals since December 2024 as estimated by Lambourne, going back to December 2024:
June 2026: 144
May 2026: 146
Apr 2026: 134
Mar 2026: 181
Feb 2026: 104
Jan 2026: 106
Dec 2025: 56
Nov 2025: 39
Oct 2025: 54
Sep 2025: 54
Aug 2025: 30
Jul 2025: 34
Jun 2025: 34
May 2025: 32
Apr 2025: 5
Mar 2025: 10
Feb 2025: 22
Jan 2025: 16
Dec 2024: 78
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