by Chris Powell, Gold Seek:
In their latest incisive criticism of the U.S. government’s repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, a decision that allowed federally insured banks to trade stocks and derivatives and thereby put the bank deposits of ordinary people at risk, Pam and Russ Martens of Wall Street on Parade reveal a telling detail about JPMorgan Chase Bank.
The detail comes from the latest quarterly report from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency about banks that trade stocks and derivatives. The Martenses write:
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
“JPMorgan Chase Bank NA also appears to have a stranglehold on trading gold and silver contracts inside its bank. Table 21 in the latest OCC report shows that all commercial banks, savings associations, and trust companies with derivatives account for $483 billion in precious metals contracts. Of that sum, JPMorgan Chase Bank NA holds $281.7 billion, or 58%.
“That concentration of activity by one bank in precious metals is being tolerated by federal regulators despite the fact that the U.S. Justice Department criminally charged JPMorgan Chase just four years ago with engaging in ‘tens of thousands of episodes of unlawful trading in the markets for precious metals futures contracts. …’ The bank admitted to the charges.”
The Martenses’ analysis is here:
The failure of government regulators to act against JPMorgan Chase’s domination of monetary metals derivatives trading really shouldn’t be a mystery. The bank almost certainly is allowed by regulators to dominate monetary metals trading because the bank is operating less for its own account than for the U.S. government’s. It’s possible and maybe even probable that other banks trading the gold and silver futures markets also are doing so as brokers for the U.S. government or other governments, providing camouflage for market rigging.
Responding to complaints of silver market manipulation in 2012, the chief of JPMorgan Chase’s commodity desk, Blythe Masters, told CNBC that the bank had no proprietary position of its own in silver and was trading silver only for clients:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gc9Me4qFZYo&t=2s
https://www.gata.org/node/11216
Of course, the CNBC reporter conducting the interview failed to ask Masters whether those clients included the U.S. government.
Back then JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon made similar assertions that the bank traded silver only for clients and wasn’t manipulating the market.
Four years ago U.S. Rep. Alex Mooney, R-West Virginia, repeatedly posed to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission a question GATA had posed but couldn’t get an answer to: Does the commission have jurisdiction over manipulative futures trading undertaken by or at the behest of the U.S. government? Eventually, the commission acknowledged Mooney’s question but still refused to answer it:
