The big stopper JPM added about two tonnes of gold, and 61,790 ounces of bullion came out of the Scotia Mocatta registered inventory.
This brings the total deliverable (registered) ounces of gold down to 432,612 which is a number that we have not seen in this inventory category since the early 1990's, well before the gold bull market.
Supposedly Simon Weeks of Scotia Mocatta, who is also the chairman of the LBMA, was encouraging producers to start hedging their production, committing their bullion to the banks before prices fall any further.
Now I don't know if that is true, but if I were a highly leveraged bullion bank or mint, and I had multiple paper claims on each ounce of inventory, I would probably encourage my analysts and other sales associates to talk up the bear case too. But this is what Andrew Maguire says, and it is only hearsay.
If I were such a one as Weeks I would come out and deny it, if it was not true. Either you said something as market guidance to some participants, or you did not.
By the way, I wonder what happened to those two JPM whistleblowers that Andrew knows, who are stashed away in some lawyers' offices somewhere.
What a funny, opaque market. More like a game of liar's poker than an efficient and transparent clearing mechanism where informed producers and buyers meet to allocate resources. But economic theory says that fraud is not possible because people are purely rational and act in their long term best interests, always. And at least on the mythical planet of Vulcan, where many Ivy League economists apparently originate, logic dictates that honesty is the best policy.
