Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
Surreptitious efforts for gold price suppression conducted through the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, soared in September and October.
The bank's monthly statements of account for those months were published recently --
https://www.bis.org/publications/statement-account-30-september-2026.pdf
https://www.bis.org/publications/statement-account-31-october-2026.pdf
-- and GATA's analyst of the bank's activities, Robert Lambourne, calculates from them that the bank's gold swaps rose from 141 tonnes at the end of August to 165 tonnes at the end of September and to 218 tonnes at the end of October, an increase of 55% in just two months.
The gold involved in the BIS swaps is believed to be held originally by a commercial bullion bank -- probably as a custodian or an authorized dealer of a gold exchange-traded fund -- and is swapped for dollars via the BIS, probably on behalf of the U.S. Federal Reserve. It is then applied by its recipient to markets as necessary to prevent demand for physical gold from driving prices upward as much as might happen without the official intervention.
Of course, this intervention for price suppression is competing against the steady acquisition of gold by central banks that no longer are cooperating with the decades-old Western central bank policy of gold price suppression to support the U.S. dollar and U.S. Treasury bonds as the world's reserve foreign exchange assets.
The recent sharp increase in gold swaps implies increased pressure on the U.S. Treasury Department and Federal Reserve to restrain the monetary metal's price and competition with the U.S. dollar and Treasury bonds.
Lambourne wrote last month that the BIS swaps seem designed to conceal the double-counting of gold held by major gold exchange-traded funds:
If he is correct, the swaps would be an extension of the longstanding Western central bank practice of controlling gold prices by creating imaginary supply of the metal via derivatives.
The BIS does not report its gold swaps candidly. They can be calculated only through changes in other data in the bank's monthly statements. The bank has quantified the tonnage of its gold swaps only in its annual reports, but those reports have always confirmed the accuracy of Lambourne's swap calculations as of the dates of the annual reports.
The BIS refuses to explain the swaps -- their purposes and participants -- thereby signifying to mainstream financial journalists and respectable analysts of the gold market that they better not ask about them if they want to continue to be invited to central bank and bullion bank Christmas parties.
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