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BIS gold swaps have collapsed 99% in four years
GATA's Robert Lambourne long has provided the most contemporaneous proof of official intervention against gold -- and the proof that gold is winning.
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1:07p ET Friday, May 23, 2025
Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
For 26 years GATA has documented extensively the efforts of Western central banks and especially the U.S. government to suppress and manipulate the price of gold to protect the U.S. dollar against competition as the world reserve currency and to control interest rates:
https://www.gata.org/node/20925
But for the last six years the most contemporaneous proof of surreptitious central bank intervention in the gold market has come from GATA's consultant about the Bank for International Settlements, Robert Lambourne, who has analyzed the BIS' monthly statements of account to discern the volume of gold swaps undertaken by the bank on its own behalf and on the behalf of its central bank members.
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The bank has never challenged Lambourne's calculations, just as it has refused to explain publicly the objectives of the gold swaps and identify their participants, but its annual reports have confirmed the accuracy of Lambourne's reports.
Since surreptitious intervention in the gold market by the U.S. government and its closest allies is a prohibited subject in Western financial journalism, Lambourne's reports have been essential to anyone outside government and central banking who sought to understand the monetary metals markets -- and for years now Lambourne's work about the BIS has shown that Western central bank policy on gold was changing dramatically.
That is, four years ago, in February 2021, Lambourne showed that the BIS had undertaken 552 tones in gold swaps. Since then the BIS' gold swaps have declined fairly steadily, and according to the BIS' March and April statements of account, published this week --
https://www.bis.org/banking/balsheet/statofacc250331.pdf
https://www.bis.org/banking/balsheet/statofacc250430.pdf
-- the BIS reduced its gold swaps to 9.5 tonnes in March and to a mere 5 tonnes in April.
If the BIS' reports are honest, as of April its gold swaps are now less than 1% of what they were four years ago.
The decline in the bank's gold swaps has coincided with a steady rise in the gold price, with frequent announcements by certain central banks of gold acquisitions, and with a growing impression that something very big is going on behind the scenes with gold.
Eventually maybe people in the West will see gold's resurrection, the debasement of their government currencies, and the refusal of their governments to acknowledge and explain their market interventions as evidence that their democracies are largely an illusion.
In the meantime, month by month Lambourne has frightened away the shills who used to deny that the gold market was manipulated or who dismissed manipulation as the ordinary and inconsequential tricks of traders having no connection with government.
Thanks in large part to GATA and a few other independent researchers and analysts, nearly everyone involved with the monetary metals knows now that governments long have waged a largely secret war against them, a war that is also aimed against their own people. Lambourne's surveillance of the BIS has produced the crucial signs that governments are retreating and gold, the ancient defender of individual liberty, is winning.
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
CPowell@GATA.org
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