Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
After a year of remaining steady at a low level, the gold swaps undertaken by the Bank for International Settlements nearly doubled in January amid growing turmoil in the gold market, from 56 tonnes in December to 106 tonnes, according to GATA's consultant on the BIS, Robert Lambourne.
Lambourne calculated the swaps total from the BIS' monthly statement of account for January, which was published last week:
https://www.bis.org/banking/balsheet/statofacc260131.pdf
While the BIS long has refused to explain the purposes of the swaps and identify the parties to them, the bank is an association of the major central banks and long has provided cover for their interventions in the gold market.
Indeed, in 2009 the head of the bank's monetary and economic department, William R. White, said at a BIS conference at the bank's headquarters in Basel, Switzerland, that influencing asset prices, especially gold and foreign exchange, is a primary purpose of international central bank cooperation:
https://www.gata.org/node/4279
A year earlier the BIS actually advertised to potential new central bank members that its services include interventions in the gold and currency markets:
https://www.gata.org/node/11012
Of course these interventions are conducted surreptitiously in order to deceive the markets and investors and accrue more secret power for central banks.
The sharp increase in BIS-arranged gold swaps in January likely indicates greater recent difficulty encountered in gold price control by anti-gold factions among governments and central banks and particularly by the U.S. Treasury Department and Federal Reserve.
Two weeks ago an unusually courageous journalist, Gabriel Friedman of Canada's National Post, asked the Federal Reserve about gold market manipulation and was refused any comment:
https://www.gata.org/node/24471
But in 2009 Federal Reserve Board Governor Kevin M. Warsh, now President Trump's nominee for Fed chairman, confirmed to GATA that among the gold-related documents the Fed was refusing to disclose to the organization were records of its gold swap arrangements:
https://www.gata.org/node/7819
For years Lambourne has been using the BIS's monthly account statements to calculate the bank's tonnage volume of gold swaps. The bank has never disputed Lambourne's calculations and its annual reports have always confirmed their accuracy.
Here are the BIS gold swap tonnage volumes as calculated by Lambourne for the last 14 months:
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
While the accelerating increase in gold price over the last year shows that price suppression policy is failing, the BIS gold swap volumes, and particularly the volume for January, show that official intervention against gold is not yet vanquished.
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
CPowell@GATA.org
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