Bud Conrad: 'Paper gold' and its effect on the gold price

8:16p ET Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

Casey Research's chief economist, Bud Conrad, reports today that the gold futures market on the New York Commodity Exchange is so concentrated that 98.5 percent of the gold delivered to the market last month came from only three banks -- Barclays, Bank of Nova Scotia, and HSBC -- and 98 percent of the deliveries were taken by just one bank, Barclays.

"The opportunity for distorting the price of gold in an environment with so few players is obvious," Conrad writes. "Barclays knows 98 percent of the buyers and is supplying 35 percent of the gold."

Of course the opportunity for gold market rigging is not yet obvious to the founder of Casey Research, Doug Casey, who argues that all markets are manipulated, that it's no big deal, that central banks have no interest in gold, and it wouldn't matter if they did have any interest because they're all irrelevant anyway. But then Conrad does the research at Casey Research and Casey merely supplies the ideology and opinions, and if the research doesn't fit the ideology and opinions, it's irrelevant too.

Conrad's report is headlined "'Paper Gold' and Its Effect on the Gold Price" and it's posted at the Casey Research Internet site here:

http://www.caseyresearch.com/articles/paper-gold-and-its-effect-on-the-g...

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.