Gold swaps undertaken by the Bank for International Settlements remained extremely low in February, according to GATA consultant Robert Lambourne, who deciphers the bank's monthly statements of account to make plain what the bank refuses to do except in its annual report.
Lambourne writes that the bank's February statement, published this week --
https://www.bis.org/banking/balsheet/statofacc250228.pdf
-- indicates that the BIS' gold swaps rose 6 tonnes, from 16 tonnes in January, to 22 tonnes in February. The bank's gold swaps stood at 78 tonnes at the end of 2024. The bank's gold swaps were above 500 tonnes at the beginning of 2022 and have fallen gradually but fairly steadily since then.
Since the BIS is exclusively an association of central banks, the swaps are a measure of their largely surreptitious intervention in the gold market, intervention that has been happening for decades but has been dutifully ignored by mainstream financial news organizations and the so-called World Gold Council, lest the world discover that the free markets preached to the world by Western nations are actually heavily rigged against the developing world.
In 2005 the head of the BIS' monetary and economic department, William R. White, told a conference at the bank's headquarters in Basel, Switzerland, that a primary purpose of international central bank cooperation is "the provision of international credits and joint efforts to influence asset prices (especially gold and foreign exchange) in circumstances where this might be thought useful":
https://www.gata.org/node/4279
The near-elimination of BIS gold swaps implies a change of policy among many central banks and the BIS itself regarding gold price suppression, as does the recent heavy accumulation of gold by many central banks.
Lambourne writes of the February BIS report: "Such a low level of swaps was the expectation if we were moving toward a time when gold was going to be revalued, as it always seemed sensible to eliminate the swaps before a reset.
"Our conjecture was always that the swaps were sourced from the gold exchange-traded funds and were possibly a return route for gold that is subject to multiple claims that originated from the Federal Reserve and were being used to hide the multiple claims.
"We are now in the period during the calendar year when no updates are provided by the BIS. This is because March 31 is the end of the bank's financial year and one assumes that no information is published until the bank's auditors are satisfied that the draft annual accounts are accurate.
"In the past this has usually resulted in the March statement of account being published in late May or even early June. The annual report itself is typically published in June."
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
CPowell@GATA.org
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