Our friend the Dutch economist Jaco Schipper reports an increase in
transparency about gold in the monthly reserve asset reports of the European
Central Bank.
Since last August, Schipper notes, the ECB's monthly report has been
distinguishing the allocated from the unallocated gold in the holdings of its
member central banks, with less than 2 percent of the gold now being reported
unallocated. That is, almost all the gold of the members of the European
Central Bank is reported as being specifically identified as owned by those
banks in whatever vaults are storing it, and little of their gold has
consisted of mere credits with other institutions:
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/external/rese...l/index.en.html
But the ECB continues to combine gold deposits and gold swaps in a single
line in its reserve report and does not identify the counterparties of the
swaps and the locations of the swapped gold, putting in question both the
central bank's overall gold position and the degree of its secret intervention
in the gold market, direct and indirect.
Indeed, the implication of its monthly report that the ECB is nearly out of
the gold market contradicts recent statements by Alexandre Gautier, the
director of market operations for the Banque de France, an ECB member, who
told meetings of the London Bullion Market Association in 2013 and 2014 that
the Banque de France is trading gold for its own account and the accounts of
other central banks "nearly on a daily basis" and that central
banks lately have been managing their gold reserves "more
actively":
http://www.gata.org/node/13373
http://gata.org/node/14716
Of course the ECB's new accounting was implemented subsequent to Gautier's
statements, so the practices of the ECB and its members may have changed
since Gautier spoke. Certainly the ECB's greater transparency is an
improvement. But as long as the central bank combines gold deposits and gold
swaps in a line item, failing to distinguish them, any funny business is
possible. And surely the ECB knows a lot more about central bank intervention
in the gold market than it is telling.
After all, the interview done by Kitco News last October with Peter
Mooslechner, executive director of Austria's central bank, another ECB member
bank, in which he acknowledged that Asian central banks were both acquiring
gold and "using their reserves in trading in the market and intervening
into the market," confirmed that central banks know very well what each
other is doing surreptitiously in the gold market and why:
http://gata.org/node/15878
That is, all major central banks are party to gold market manipulation.
They're just not telling the whole story to the rest of us, lest the world
financial system start enjoying free markets and risk becoming more
democratic.
