Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
GATA's consultant on the Bank for International Settlements, Robert Lambourne, reports today that the bank's monthly statement for July was published this week --
https://www.bis.org/banking/balsheet/statofacc260731.pdf
-- and his calculations from it show that the bank's gold swaps fell to 131 tonnes, 13 tonnes fewer than June's 144 tonnes.
A table showing the swaps by month going back to December 2024 is appended.
We recently came upon a Reuters report from 2010 about the bank's disclosure of its involvement in gold swaps --
-- a report we hadn't seen before. For those who can't get full access to the report at the Reuters site, a PDF copy of the report is here:
https://www.gata.org/sites/default/files/Reuters-BIS-Gold-Swaps-07-16-2010_0.pdf
The Reuters report preceded by two weeks a report in the Financial Times about the BIS swaps, a report to which GATA has often referred --
https://www.ft.com/content/3e659ed0-9b39-11df-baaf-00144feab49a
-- as well as a report the next day in Business Insider headlined "European Banks Lent Their Customers' Gold to the BIS":
https://www.businessinsider.com/european-banks-lent-customers-gold-to-the-bis-2010-7
Our discovery of the Reuters report strengthened our suspicion that the BIS swaps have been and still are being used to facilitate double-counting of metal that publicly has been claimed as the property of gold exchange-traded funds, and particularly metal claimed by the main gold ETF, GLD.
The old Reuters report prompted Lambourne to offer some reflections on it and the swaps issue. They are below.
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
CPowell@GATA.org
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By Robert Lambourne
Thursday, August 13, 2026
That 2010 report from Reuters 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 media organizations (like the Financial Times) to support this line of thinking.
3. This line of thinking was 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. 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 the suspicion that they remain a sensitive topic.
5. The Reuters report raises one important point that doesn't seem highlighted except by GATA. That is, the size of the swaps suggests that the gold involved was probably not owned in an 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 warehouse ETF 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 report. GLD places 7.9% of its gold with HSBC, and JP Morgan holds 92.1%:
https://www.spdrgoldshares.com/usa/gld/
Nearly all the gold is vaulted in London, and JP Morgan is clearly the dominant custodian. I think this supports the presumption that the U.S. Treasury Department is well positioned to confiscate gold held by GLD.
If GLD held double-counted gold via the swaps prior to JP Morgan’s becoming a custodian of the fund’s gold and JPMorgan 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 ever happened.
Think of all the litigation if the Treasury ever admitted participating in gold price suppression by selling gold it did not own.
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BIS GOLD SWAPS MONTHLY FROM DECEMBER 2024 TO JULY 2026
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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Robert Lambourne is a retired business executive in the United Kingdom who consults for GATA about the Bank for International Settlements and U.S. government debt.
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