GATA's and gold's old friend Larry Parks, executive director of the
Foundation for the Advancement of Monetary Education (FAME, http://fame.org), calls
attention tonight to the third-quarter 2017 report of the U.S. Comptroller of
the Currency, which shows that just several government-insured U.S. banks
hold $45 billion in derivative positions related to monetary metals.
The chart disclosing these positions, appearing on Page 32 of the OCC
report, is reproduced at GATA's internet site here:
http://gata.org/files/PreciousMetalsDerivativ...nsuredBanks.jpg
The full OCC report is posted at GATA's internet site here:
http://gata.org/files/OCC-Q3-2017-ReportOn...Derivatives.pdf
Parks asks: Are these derivatives a "pass-through" on behalf of
bank customers or are they held by the banks on their own behalf?
Of course the probability is that these positions are actually the positions
of the U.S. government and other governments using the banks as intermediary
cover lest more explicit public records of gold and silver market
intervention be created.
After all, filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and
the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission already have documented that
governments and central banks are receiving discounts from CME Group,
operator of the major futures exchanges in the United States, for
surreptitiously trading all financial and commodity futures contracts offered
by CME Group exchanges:
target="_blank"
http://www.gata.org/node/14385
target="_blank"
http://www.gata.org/node/14411
In January GATA published CME Group's discount schedule for such trading
by governments and central banks:
target="_blank"
http://www.gata.org/node/17976
How likely is it that a few U.S. banks would be so involved with the
monetary metals derivatives without the approval or instructions of the U.S. government?
After all, in April 2012 Blythe Masters, chief of the commodity division
of one of the banks cited in the OCC derivatives report, JPMorganChase, told
CNBC that the bank maintained only client positions in the monetary metals,
not positions of its own:
target="_blank"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gc9Me4qFZYo
target="_blank"
https://www.benzinga.com/media/cnbc/12/...commodities-...
target="_blank"
https://www.ft.com/content/efc5618a-...0a-00144feab49a< target="_blank"/p>
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/bly...ver-manipula...
Of course as far as we can tell nobody from the mainstream financial news
media has ever asked Masters or JPM whether those clients include governments
or central banks, as CME Group has admitted in its SEC and CFTC filings that
it does a lot of secret business with them.
