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Ted Butler: Alasdair Macleod has the wrong whale

Section: Daily Dispatches

11:13p ET Monday, July 15, 2019

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

Silver market analyst Ted Butler today disputes GoldMoney research director Alasdair Macleod about who is really long and short silver on the New York Commodities Exchange.

Butler adds: "I'm sick and tired about hearing how JPMorgan is acting on China's behalf, a favorite of the whack-job, tinfoil hat conspiracists.

... Dispatch continues below ...



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"For one thing, would that make the manipulation run by JPMorgan any less illegal? Even if JPMorgan was manipulating prices in its role as the big silver and gold Comex short for the benefit of a large client, how would that make the manipulation kosher? All it would add are charges of treason against JPM for benefiting a foreign nation over the United States.

"But the real proof that JPMorgan is in it for its own benefit is because that's how these boyz roll. JPMorgan putting the interests of its clients (any client) above its own has to be a joke. When has that ever occurred?"

But one does not have to be a "whack-job, tinfoil-hat conspiracist" to note that JPMorganChase officials have denied trading in silver for the firm's own accounts, insisting instead that the firm has traded the monetary metals only for clients.

GATA certainly has no more access to the bank's trading ledger than Butler has, but one needn't be a "whack-job, tinfoil-hat conspiracist" to note that JPMorganChase often has acted for the U.S. government in the markets -- for starters, it is a primary dealer in U.S. government securities. While it is easy to imagine the bank front-running government trades, it is also easy to imagine the bank making trades for foreign interests at the behest of the U.S. government, which, after all, is fully authorized by the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, as amended, to trade secretly and manipulatively in any market in the world through the U.S. Treasury Department's Exchange Stabilization Fund.

Does Butler really know all agreements and understandings the U.S. government has with China's government? Does he know every U.S. trading bank's every relationship with China?

Yes, as Butler suggests, JPMorganChase is effectively an enormous criminal organization, frequently caught in and fined for wrongdoing. Yet the bank has not been shut down or broken up and still conducts U.S. government business. The U.S. government seems to need the bank.

So why can Butler not acknowledge the possibility that rigging the silver market is not the bank's undertaking exclusively -- that there might be other and even bigger wrongdoers in the markets? Does Butler really think the U.S. government is any more indifferent to the price of silver than it is to the price of gold?

After all, signing the Coinage Act of 1965, which demonetized silver in the United States, President Lyndon B. Johnson warned investors that if necessary the U.S. government would rig the silver market, dumping metal from the government's stockpile to prevent the metal's price from rising:

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-signing-the-coinag...

Governments and central banks get discounts for secretly trading all futures contracts on major exchanges in the United States, the exchanges run by CME Group. The rules for those discounts require that a government or central bank "have a relationship with a CME Group clearning member":

http://www.gata.org/node/18925

So how can Butler be sure that JPMorganChase is not involved in any of that trading -- sure that all ideas of silver market rigging stop with JPMorganChase?

In any case Butler's new commentary is headlined "Wrong Whale" and it's posted at GoldSeek's companion site, SilverSeek, here:

http://silverseek.com/commentary/wrong-whale-17689

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
CPowell@GATA.org

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