Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
GATA's consultant about the Bank for International Settlements, Robert Lambourne, reports today that the bank's gold swaps are not going away -- that the bank's August statement of account, published this week --
https://www.bis.org/publications/statement-account-31-august-2026.pdf
-- indicates that its gold swaps increased by 10 tonnes during the month and now stand at 141 tonnes.
The swaps appear to have increased in part while the central bank of the Netherlands was transferring and repatriating gold from U.S. and Canadian government depositories in the name of "crisis preparedness" and protecting the bank better against "increasing geopolitical unrest" --
-- which even the protector of the Western financial establishment, the Financial Times, attributed in part to fear of seizure by the U.S. government:
Lambourne lately has reckoned that BIS gold swaps well may be a mechanism for concealing that gold attributed to the exchange-traded fund GLD and national gold reserves has been double-counted -- that is, oversubscribed -- which should not surprise anyone who has pursued GATA's extensive documentation of Western gold price suppression policy:
https://www.gata.org/node/20925
After all, that policy long has been based on creating a large imaginary supply of the monetary metal to use for manipulation of markets via derivatives, a policy that was essentially outlined by the secret March 1999 report of the staff of the International Monetary Fund. The report maintained that the IMF must continue to let its central bank members conflate their gold loans with their gold held securely in their own vaults, lest outsiders be able to perceive official interventions in the gold market to keep the metal's price down:
https://www.gata.org/node/12016
The Netherlands central bank's transfer of gold reserves out of the United States and Canada would be perfectly consistent with concern about double counting and seizure of gold. Indeed, double counting is effectively a form of seizure.
Lambourne's new report about the increase in BIS gold swaps and their likely use to conceal double counting is appended.
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
CPowell@GATA.org
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By Robert Lambourne
Wednesday, September 9, 2026
The Bank for International Settlements has published its August 2026 statement of account --
https://www.bis.org/publications/statement-account-31-august-2026.pdf
-- from which we can estimate that the volume of the bank's gold swaps increased by 10 tonnes in August, from 131 tonnes in July to 141 tonnes.
In Appendix 1 below is a table of GATA's estimates of BIS gold swaps since December 2024.
As can be seen from the table, the level of gold swaps has stayed above 100 tonnes throughout 2026, a much higher level than in 2025.
A regular reader of GATA's dispatches on the BIS gold swaps will know that over the 16-year period since the gold swaps were first reported in the bank's 2010 annual report, we have come to believe that they are used to hide the double-counting of gold that is likely claimed as owned both by the U.S. Federal Reserve and the largest gold exchange-traded fund, whose ticker symbol is GLD.
In Appendix 2 is a copy of what was reported last month in the dispatch covering the BIS gold swaps estimated for July this year. This seems topical at the moment with recent moves by the Dutch central bank to sell its gold vaulted at the Federal Reserve and held in allocated form to be replaced by gold purchased in Europe. Hence the points made in that dispatch concerning the possible confiscation of the gold in GLD are again brought into focus.
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Appendix 1
BIS GOLD SWAPS MONTHLY FROM DECEMBER 2024 TO AUGUST 2026 IN TONNES
Aug 2026: 141
July 2026: 131
June 2026: 144
May 2026: 146
Apr 2026: 134
Mar 2026: 184
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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Appendix 2
A report from Reuters in 2010 --
https://www.gata.org/sites/default/files/Reuters-BIS-Gold-Swaps-07-16-2010_0.pdf
-- is, I believe, supportive of what GATA has published on the swaps over the last 16 years.
1. The Reuters report reinforces that there was plenty of speculation, rumor, and comment on the swaps when the BIS' annual report was published in June-July 2010. The swaps were fairly important news.
2. The Reuters report has reminded me that back then many commentators suspected that the swaps were some sort of operation by central banks to support commercial banks that were struggling. The official story was never actually set out in writing by the BIS; the bank only issued oral briefings to favored news organizations (like the Financial Times) to encourage this line of thinking.
3. This line of thinking held that the swaps were a mechanism to allow the BIS to provide dollar funding to commercial banks. But it always seemed to me that the swaps were much more likely to be driven by gold market concerns and so were linked to gold price suppression efforts. The Reuters report highlights that this was a more widespread view at the time.
4. The continued silence from the BIS on the reasons for the swaps -- more than 16 years after first reporting them -- reinforces suspicion that they remain a sensitive topic.
5. The 2010 Reuters report raises one important point that doesn't seem highlighted anywhere except by GATA. That is, the size of the swaps suggests that the gold involved was probably not owned in allocated form by any commercial bank.
6. This silence over the years has led me to believe that the swaps were used to move exchange-traded fund gold, possibly just gold owned by GLD, via the BIS to the Federal Reserve or possibly the Bank of England. This would allow the gold to be double-counted.
7. I reckon that the Reuters report, although silent on the possible use of ETF gold, is supportive of what GATA asserts as the likely reason for the swaps. Commercial banks do not own lots of unencumbered gold, and if, as the BIS claimed, its swaps were really a mechanism to provide dollar funding to commercial banks, why would the bank continue to undertake swaps for all the years since? Surely simple dollar loans could be used instead.
8. And why did the volume of BIS gold swaps, which had been as high as 594 tonnes in November 2017, fall faster after December 2022 when JP Morgan's vaults began being used to vault GLD gold?
9. I remain confident that the swaps are a key part of a system to maintain some control over double-counted gold. Confirmation of this will probably be provided by the eventual confiscation of Western ETF gold.
In addition, note the allocation of the GLD gold between the ETF's two custodians, HSBC and JP Morgan, based on the ETF's recent report. GLD places only 7.9% of its gold with HSBC while JP Morgan holds 92.1%:
https://www.spdrgoldshares.com/usa/gld/
Nearly all the GLD gold is vaulted in London and JP Morgan is clearly the dominant custodian. This supports the presumption that the U.S. Treasury Department is well positioned to seize gold held by GLD.
If GLD held double-counted gold via the swaps prior to JP Morgan's becoming a custodian of the ETF's gold, and if JP Morgan had been using some other mechanism to hide the gold swaps, then at some point this double-counted gold will have to be taken over by the U.S. Treasury to conceal that double counting was perpetrated.
Think of all the litigation if the Treasury Department ever admitted participating in gold price suppression by selling gold it did not own.
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