GATA Claims To Have Evidence Of "Massive Physical Short Gold And Silver Positions That Can Not Be Covered"

"Even as the CFTC is meeting later this month to establish position limits in the gold, silver, and other precious metals' markets, it could be none other than the CFTC's core banks, and Mr. Gensler's former Goldman bosses, that form the very core of the biggest market manipulation collusion syndicate in the history of the commodity markets.

If GATA is not bluffing and indeed has evidence of massively uncoverable physical positions, and should this evidence be made public, the repercussions for the price of gold will be unprecedented."  - from a ZeroHedge article

Here is a link and excerpts of the GATA letter:

As an executive at Goldman Sachs in London, Robert Rubin developed an idea to borrow gold from central banks at minimal interest rates (around 1 percent), sell the bullion for cash, and use the cash to fund Goldman Sachs' operations. Rubin was confident that central banks would control the gold price with ever-more leasing or outright sales of their gold reserves and that consequently the borrowed gold could be bought back without difficulty. This was the beginning of the gold carry trade.

When Rubin became U.S. treasury secretary, he made it government policy to surreptitiously operate an identical gold carry trade but on a much larger scale. This became the principal mechanism of what was called the "strong-dollar policy." Subsequent treasury secretaries have repeated a commitment to a "strong dollar," suggesting that they were continuing to feed official gold into the market more or less clandestinely to support the dollar and suppress interest rates and precious metals prices.

Lawrence Summers, who followed Rubin as treasury secretary, was an expert in gold's influence on financial markets. Previously, as a professor at Harvard University, Summers co-authored an academic study titled "Gibson's Paradox and the Gold Standard," (see Footnote 1 below) which concluded that in a free market gold prices move inversely to real interest rates, and, conversely, if gold prices are "fixed," then interest rates can be maintained at lower levels than would be the case in a free market. This was the economic theory behind the "strong dollar policy."

The CFTC's own reports of November 2009 show that just two U.S. banks held 43 percent of the commercial net short position in gold and 68 percent of the commercial net short position in silver. In gold, these two banks were short 123,331 contracts but long only 523 contracts, and in silver they were short 41,318 contracts and long only 1,426 contracts. How improbable is it that these two banks attract most of the investors who want only to sell short? (See Footnote 5 below.)

It has been possible to extrapolate that the two banks that hold these large manipulative short positions on the Comex are JPMorgan Chase and HSBC because of their huge positions in the OTC derivatives market, whose regulator, the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, does not provide anonymity when it publishes market data. (See Footnote 6 below.) In the first quarter 2009 OCC derivatives report, JPMorgan Chase and HSBC held more than 95 percent of the gold and precious metals derivatives of all U.S. banks, with a combined notional value of $120 billion. This concentration dwarfs the concentration in the gold and silver futures markets and should raise great concern about the lack of position limits on the Comex.

It is also disturbing to us that HSBC is the custodian for the major gold exchange-traded fund, GLD, and that JPMorgan Chase is the custodian for the major silver exchange-traded fund, SLV. It is a significant material omission to fail to disclose to GLD and SLV investors that the custodian banks of the two exchange-traded funds have an interest in falling prices in the futures and derivatives markets.  - GATA source letter

Larry