Saturday, August 8, 2015

Accounting Trick Averts Gold-Shortage Crisis

A few days ago, a Comex (Commodity Exchange) gold-warehouse report showed that the availability of registered gold was down to a mere 10 tons, the lowest it has been in modern times. That means there is one ounce of real gold for every 124 ounces that speculators think they own because they have paper contracts for it. To prevent panic among investors, a few days later, Comex reported that, miraculously, it’s eligible gold reserves jumped by a whopping 78% overnight, from 362K ounces to 643K. Worried investors went back to sleep thinking that the problem had been solved. However, the new “available” gold did not come from an influx of the real thing, but from an accounting trick performed by JPMorgan. The bank simply took 276,000 ounces of its “eligible” gold (meaning registered to specific parties and not to be used for fulfillment of futures contracts) and reclassified it as “eligible” gold (meaning it can be delivered for fulfillment of contracts. Presto! Crisis solved – at the expense of those naive souls who think that banks can be trusted to honor their contracts. ZeroHedge 2015 Aug 6 (Story)

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