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BIS continues as facilitator of surreptitious intervention against gold
8:13p ET Tuesday, February 3, 2026
Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
Following what seems like the attempt on January 29 by the U.S. government, supported by the Federal Reserve and major investment banks, to enable large short positions in gold futures and especially silver futures to be more easily covered on the New York Commodities Exchange, it should be emphasized again that since 2009 the most contemporaneous proof of surreptitious central bank intervention in the gold market has come from the use of gold swaps arranged by the Bank for International Settlements.
GATA's consultant about the BIS, Robert Lambourne, reports that the December 2025 statement of account for the BIS was published yesterday afternoon --
https://www.bis.org/banking/balsheet/statofacc251231.pdf
-- and again it confirmed that surreptitious official activity in gold was enabled via BIS gold swaps.
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These swaps long have been accurately estimated by Lambourne from the BIS' monthly statements. His estimates have been confirmed by the bank's annual reports.
Lambourne calculates from the bank's December 2025 statement that BIS gold swaps rose by 17 tonnes during the month, from 39 in November to 56 in December.
The bank has never challenged Lambourne's calculations. Indeed, no one has.
The bank has also refused to explain publicly the objectives of its gold swaps and to identify their participants.
While the BIS never provides enough information to identify the parties to its swap transactions, it's likely that the gold involved is held by a commercial bullion bank (probably as a custodian of a gold exchange-traded fund) and is swapped for dollars via the BIS on behalf of the Federal Reserve.
The only time the BIS offered any explanation of the swaps was in an interview given to the Financial Times in 2010 by its general manager, Jaime Caruana:
https://www.ft.com/content/3e659ed0-9b39-11df-baaf-00144feab49a
Of course much has changed in the gold and currency markets since then.
This table shows the tonnage of BIS gold swaps for each month-end as estimated by GATA since December 2024:
Dec 2025: 56
Nov 2025: 39
Oct 2025: 54
Sep 2025: 54
Aug 2025: 30
Jul 2025: 34
Jun 2025: 34
May 2025: 32
Apr 2025: 5
Mar 2025: 10
Feb 2025: 22
Jan 2025: 16
Dec 2024: 78
For years now the BIS gold swaps have indicated that Western central bank policy on gold has been changing dramatically.
That is, four years ago, in February 2021, Lambourne showed that the BIS had undertaken 552 tonnes in gold swaps. Since then the volume of BIS gold swaps has declined by 90%.
The decline in the BIS' gold swaps has coincided with a steady rise in the gold price, as well as with JPMorganChase's becoming a joint custodian of the exchange-traded fund GLD. Presumably GLD metal is now available via JPMorganChase for surreptitious application to emergencies caused by high demand for gold.
JPMorganChase has a record of surreptitiously trading in the gold market on behalf of central banks. As Bloomberg News reported about the bank in 2022 in connection with the conviction of its traders who spoofed the gold market:
"Another set of important clients were central banks, which trade gold for their reserves and are among the biggest players in the bullion market. At least 10 central banks held their metal in vaults run by JPMorgan in 2010, according to documents disclosed in court."
Along with recent announcements by certain central banks of gold acquisitions, all this has created a growing impression among market observers that something very big has been 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 countries are not as democratic as are imagined to be.
Because of GATA and a few other independent researchers and analysts, nearly everyone seriously involved with gold and silver knows now that Western governments particularly long have waged a largely secret war against the monetary metals, a war that is also aimed against their own people, a war whose documentation has been compiled and summarized by GATA here:
GATA's surveillance of the BIS keeps discerning the crucial signs that Western governments are retreating from gold price suppression -- and that gold, the ancient defender of individual liberty, is starting to win.
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
CPowell@GATA.org
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