There was 500 tons removed from the GLD [SPDR Gold Trust ETF] warehouse by the bullion banks. That was a massive physical overhang removed from the market. People don’t really understand how the GLD ETF works. When people are buying the GLD, they are not buying or selling gold; they are buying and selling shares.
The gold sits in a warehouse and is only available to authorized participants. If you look at the list of authorized participants and look at the list of bullion banks, they are pretty much the same people: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, etc.
Those banks have the ability to buy up shares, take the shares, cash them in, and get physical gold. And they were doing that and they were sending that gold to Shanghai to support trading and leasing on the Shanghai gold exchange. So when you take 500 tons and dump it on the market, that’s about 20 percent of the annual mining supply. It’s a massive physical injection.
The other factor is just outright manipulation, which is very visible in Comex future prices. I’ve seen some statistical analysis that demonstrates market manipulation beyond the shadow of a doubt.
So the point is that between central bank manipulation through Comex futures and bullion banks dumping the physical, and by cleaning out the GLD warehouse, and also the Comex warehouse for that matter, there is a massive amount of gold that came on the market over and above normal supply trends, putting massive selling pressure on the Comex.
So that was a bad combination, but the problem is that it’s not sustainable.
