Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
GATA's consultant about the Bank for International Settlements, Robert Lambourne, was too modest to make a big deal of it tonight in his update about the bank's intervention in the gold market via gold swaps –
https://goldseek.com/article/bis-reduced-gold-swaps-more-half-june
-- but the bank's annual report inadvertently has confirmed the longstanding accuracy of his analysis.
For years now the BIS has been surreptitiously intervening in the gold market for one or more of its central bank members, with its gold swap totals being the only clear documentation of the interventions. So of course the BIS doesn't report the swaps plainly in its monthly statement of account.
No, the BIS swaps total is made plain only once a year, and for only one month, in the bank's annual report. Lambourne strives to report the bank's swaps on a monthly basis, and this involves laborious calculations from data in the bank's monthly statements.
As Lambourne reported tonight, the BIS' recently published annual report for 2023 acknowledged 77 tonnes of gold swaps as of March 31. See Page 185 of the annual report here:
https://www.bis.org/about/areport/areport2023.pdf
In April Lambourne had calculated that BIS gold swaps as of March 31 totaled 78 tonnes:
https://www.gata.org/node/22660
Despite the thick smokescreen the BIS maintains, Lambourne's estimate was off by just 1 tonne, a difference that likely could have been caused by variations in gold price reports at the end of the month in question.
No one outside central banking (and presumably government intelligence agencies) monitors this documentation of gold market intervention except for GATA's Lambourne. The BIS' camouflaged swaps data is recurring proof that central banks -- or at least a powerful one -- strive to rig the gold market to prevent the monetary metal from returning to its proper place as the measure of government currencies and government financial probity.
No mainstream financial news organization will touch this data. It's just too sensitive. Even the wonderfully anti-establishment news and commentary site Zero Hedge won't touch it.
But the gold swap data reveals more about financial reality on Planet Earth than anything else -- reveals that all financial values are rigged by an essentially totalitarian system and not determined by markets -- and thanks to Lambourne the data is available only from GATA.
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