Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
The TF Metals Report's Turd Ferguson (aka Craig Hemke) announced Wednesday that he has made a formal complaint to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission about what looks like JPMorganChase's exceeding trader position limits in silver futures.
Ferguson writes: "Since there is a stated position limit of just 1,500 contracts for each front/delivery month, you might be asking yourself how JPM gets away with stopping far more than that number. If you go back and look at the 2015 and 2016 tables, note that JPM seems to adhere to these limits each month. So why and how did they manage to stop 2,689 in March? That's a good question so I took the time yesterday to submit a formal complaint to the CFTC.
"Given my experience in dealing with the CFTC, in no way do I expect any aggressive action from this neutered and fully-controlled agency. Instead, I just thought it would be fun to see if I heard anything back from them at all. Will I even get a response? I can tell you that, so far, I haven't even received one of those 'thank you for writing us, we'll look into it' e-mails, so it's not looking good. However, if I do eventually hear from them, I'll be sure to write follow up to this post."
Since a few years ago JPMorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon said the bank had no position of its own in silver and was just trading on behalf of clients, its seeming violation of position limits supports suspicion that the bank's clients in silver (as well as gold) are governments, particularly the governments of the United States and China.
After all, the U.S. government's Exchange Stabilization Fund, established by the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, which was amended in the 1970s, is authorized to trade not just gold and foreign exchange but "other instruments of credit and securities," apparently without limit as to jurisdiction:
https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/international/ESF/Pages/esf-ind...
And in its filings to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, CME Group, operator of the major futures exchanges in the United States, has reported that its clients include governments and central banks and even that they are offered volume trading discounts for trading all futures contracts offered by CME Group exchanges, not just financial futures:
http://www.gata.org/node/14385
http://www.gata.org/node/14411
Fortunately for governments and practitioners of technical analysis of markets, this futures trading by governments is of no interest to mainstream financial news organizations, since such journalism might reveal that what the world perceives as markets are actually mere holograms.
The TF Metals Report's commentary is prosaically headlined "March Comex Silver 'Deliveries'" and can be found here:
http://silverseek.com/article/march-comex-silver-deliveries-16443
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
CPowell@GATA.org
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