I received an email from one of my readers on the July 4th holiday. He expressed dismay at the recent gold take-down that occurred at the end of June and on July 3rd. I am sure he is even more distressed, now, with the huge take down that happened on July 7th. He wondered how bankers can still have the power to pull off big reductions in gold prices whenever they choose? It is a question that is flowing through the minds of many people. They are still doing it, in spite of a relatively successful ongoing lawsuit against manipulation of the London gold fix, and in the face of a gold-friendly Presidential administration.
All I can say is that patience is a virtue that is always rewarded. The people who are orchestrating these market manipulations, in the gold market and elsewhere, are extraordinarily ruthless and well-connected. The bullion banks are deeply enmeshed with governments throughout the Western world, and they’ve been doing this for a long time.
On top of that, they receive an average of about 7 tons of new gold every single day from the mining companies. It can be used to fill the extra demand caused by their shenanigans in the very short term. Also, it seems likely that they will continue to draw gold out of the US Gold Reserve. The fact that the gold market is tight, however, as illustrated by backwardation between the futures and the physical gold price in London, does imply that their access to the US Gold Reserve is not unlimited.
The reason they get 7 tons of new gold to play with, every day, is that mining companies are foolish enough to sell to them, at whatever price is created by the London “fix.” Regardless of the outward trappings, and even when it is cured of whatever corruption recently went with it, the fix is largely determined by manipulations on the paper gold market in New York (a/k/a COMEX). If mining company executives developed a backbone and took joint action to reject the legitimacy of COMEX pricing, the power of the banks over the gold market would end. Miners could refuse to sell their product at a fake price. If they did that, everything would change.
Unfortunately, these same miners also rely on these same banks to finance their operations. The banks are a source of ready cash to pay executive salaries. In addition, a bad recommendation from a major bank’s research department torpedoes a mining company’s stock price and cuts into the personal wealth of mining executives who are paid in part by stock bonuses. Adding to the problem, many of the banks are directly or indirectly represented on mining company boards of directors. In other words, the mining companies are not likely to take a stand against the manipulating banks.
The game would also come to a screeching halt if the flow of sovereign gold from America dried up. The fact that the not-so-elusive “gold supplier of last resort” is the US government is so obvious that it is almost laughable. US Treasury is supplying a huge amount of gold into the world market. No other entity could do it. Someone is supplying the massive gap between supply and demand that has existed since gold prices were taken down from their equilibrium point between $1,500 and $1,600 in early 2013.
I don’t want to get into the details of the gap between supply and demand. Nor do I have space to describe in detail exactly how gold is manipulated. Doing so would make this article too long, and I’ve already done it. My past articles and the thriller novel, “The Synod” (eBook) (paperback), provide the information you need. But, to put things in context, I will say this. The US government is supplying location swaps on gold stored inside the official US gold reserve to the Bank of England. The British central bank, in turn, is releasing gold bars into the market in London. Those gold bars do not belong to the UK. They belong to customers of the Bank of England. That’s why they need the location swaps.
The policy of occasionally using the US gold reserve to suppress gold prices is an old one, going as far back as the 1970s. There is documentation of a huge swap that happened between the US Treasury and Bank of England in 1980, just about a month before the collapse of gold prices from their height of $850. However, the huge gap between supply and demand since 2013 means that the policy was vastly expanded under Obama. Again, I can’t triple the size of this article by going into the specific details here, and you can read my past articles and “The Synod” (eBook) ((paperback)) to find out everything you need to know.
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