GATA Chairman Chris Powell provided a “GOLD MARKET RIGGING UPDATE” at this week’s New Orleans Investment Conference.
Chris kindly gave SilverTrade permission to publish his entire New Orleans presentation in its entirety for those unable to attend.
Chris Powell: Gold Market Rigging Update, and What Gold’s Friends Can Count On
ILLUSTRATION 1: Introduction
Remarks by Chris Powell, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
New Orleans Investment Conference
Thursday, October 29, 2026
For many years at this conference GATA has called attention to the historical documents of Western government intervention in the gold and currency markets, intervention meant to suppress the price of gold and to defend the U.S. dollar and U.S. and other government bonds against competition.
I don’t think we have to do as much of that anymore. First, because the historical documents are so extensive and explicit that if you haven’t yet realized that governments often act against their competitors in the money business, foremost of which is gold, you probably never will.
Reviewing the documents is no longer as necessary, second, because so much financial news in the last year has been about government interventions that one hardly needs historical documents anymore. The direct and indirect interventions explode in the news nearly every week.
ILLUSTRATION 2: Warsh letter to Olson
The new chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, Kevin M. Warsh, knows all about government interventions in the markets and particularly interventions in the gold market. During Warsh’s first term at the Fed back in 2009, he was designated as the Fed’s hearing officer handling GATA’s request for access to the Fed’s gold documents. While Warsh denied our request, he at least acknowledged, in a letter to GATA’s lawyer, that among the documents the Fed insisted on keeping secret were records of its gold swap arrangements with foreign banks:
Gold swaps are mechanisms of intervention in the gold market that help central banks and bullion banks move metal around to control prices. I’ll return to gold swaps shortly.
ILLUSTRATION 3: Warsh essay in WSJ
Two years later, in 2011, when his first term on the Fed had ended, Warsh even published an essay in The Wall Street Journal criticizing what he called “financial repression” by government. He wrote: “Policy makers are finding it tempting to pursue ‘financial repression’ - suppressing market prices that they don’t like.” He added: “Efforts to manage and manipulate asset prices are not new.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204770404577080181384917926
http://www.gata.org/node/10839
With such candor in the Wall Street Journal, Warsh sounded almost like GATA. For, indeed, manipulating asset prices and currency values long has been a primary purpose of modern central banking.
Soon after his essay was published I reached Warsh by e-mail at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he had become a visiting fellow in economics. I asked him if he had learned about “financial repression” through his service at the Fed. I also asked him if he would specify the asset prices that, as he had written, were being manipulated by policy makers.
Warsh cordially wished me a nice day. He wasn’t going to be that candid.
ILLUSTRATION 4: FT article and photo of Bessent
Last month U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was brazen about his practice of “financial repression.” He boasted about the Treasury Department’s intervention to support the Japanese yen and prevent the Bank of Japan from having to provide such support by selling U.S. Treasury bonds, which would have raised U.S. interest rates.
“When we intervene with the Japanese yen,” Secretary Bessent said, “I have pretty good insight into what the Bank of Japan is going to do, what Japanese policymakers are going to do. I have asymmetric information.”
Then he declared: “I am the house now. You can bet against me if you want.”
But some market analysts were not so impressed by the Treasury’s brazen intervention to support the yen. They wondered aloud how well U.S. Treasury bonds could be serving as the main component of world financial reserves if nations couldn’t sell them in a crisis without causing another crisis.
In June on CNBC Bessent also had been clear about U.S. policy to control the currency markets.
Boasting about the United States’ takeover of Venezuela’s oil industry and the resulting dollar invoicing of Venezuela’s oil sales, Bessent said: “Dollar dominance is essential. Everything we are doing is pushing the dollar”:
Thus the Treasury secretary has been giving a pretty good lesson about what are called “free markets” in what is called the “Free World.”
ILLUSTRATION 5: Bloomberg calls Bessent top interventionist
In August Bloomberg News went on to describe Bessent as the most interventionist Treasury secretary in decades:
By contrast, no crisis is caused or threatened when governments sell gold to support their own currencies or raise money, as Turkey and Russia have done this year. Gold continues to be immensely valuable and versatile in a financial crisis, for governments and individuals alike.
ILLUSTRATION 6: RBA 2003 annual report
After all, the Reserve Bank of Australia used to note explicitly in its annual reports that it held gold precisely for currency intervention:
https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/annual-reports/rba/2003/pdf/2003-report.pdf
Of course that was when central banks were more candid about their operations.
ILLUSTRATION 7: BIS headquarters
There wasn’t much candor about gold this year over at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, the central bank of the central banks, the facilitator of those gold swaps involving the Federal Reserve.
ILLUSTRATION 8: PowerPoint page from BIS
The BIS has advertised in its PowerPoint presentations to potential members that its services include surreptitious interventions in the gold and currency markets.
The BIS’ monthly statements of account, as analyzed by GATA consultant Robert Lambourne, lately have shown an increasing tonnage of gold swaps - at last report, as of August, 141 tonnes.
ILLUSTRATION 9: Lambourne dispatch
This month Lambourne dove into the reports issued by the gold exchange-traded funds GLD, GLDM, and IAU. He compared the gold holdings claimed by those ETFs with his calculations of BIS gold swaps over the last 15 years, as indicated in the bank’s monthly statements of accounts. He concluded that the BIS gold swaps were probably being used to conceal the movement of central bank gold - that is, almost certainly U.S. government gold - into and out of the ETFs so that gold purchases by the ETFs would not noticeably raise prices and so physical gold markets would not run short of metal:
https://www.gata.org/node/25077
For example, Lambourne noted that the gold swaps tonnage reported by the BIS at the end of March 2010-346 tonnes - was virtually identical to the increase in the gold reported held by GLD in the first quarter of 2009, 347 tonnes.
Like gold leasing by central banks, the BIS swap mechanism of moving central bank gold into and out of gold exchange-traded funds would allow the gold at issue to be presumed to reside in two or more places at once. The swaps would increase the market’s supply of imaginary gold - derivative gold or “paper gold” - since central banks that are leasing or swapping gold don’t have to report their leases and swaps as causing any change in their gold reserves.
ILLUSTRATION 10: IMF 1999 secret staff report
Indeed, the secret March 1999 report of the staff of the International Monetary Fund -
https://www.gata.org/node/12016
- said that central banks had to be allowed to continue to conceal their gold swaps and leases precisely to facilitate their secret interventions in the market. If the market understood the extent of gold interventions, the interventions might fail.
Using gold from those three exchange-traded funds for gold swaps for gold market price control should be technically easy. For it could be accomplished via a single institution - JPMorgan Chase Bank, which is the custodian of the gold held by all three of the ETFs as well as a frequent market agent for the U.S. government.
That is, most of the gold of the major ETFs is controlled by JPMorgan Chase.
Double-counting, triple-counting, or overcounting gold by a factor of many dozens of times long has been the essence of Western government gold price suppression policy. This policy has used derivatives, leases, and swaps to create vast imaginary supplies of the metal in a fractional-reserve gold banking system, a system based on confidence that most gold owners would always accept paper certificates and never ask for delivery of their metal.
Even as many central banks recently have been buying gold or repatriating their reserves stored in the United States, and even as Asia, particularly the Chinese government, has been acquiring huge amounts of real metal, the paperizing and fractional-reserving impulse survives in the West.
ILLUSTRATION 11: FT on tokenized gold
Market authorities in London now are advocating “tokenizing” gold - that is, creating another mechanism whereby gold held in a vault could be “dematerialized” in a fractional-reserve system so it might appear to be in any number of other places at the same time:
https://www.ft.com/content/a45a2f1f-03d9-46aa-8307-fe89edd7e589?syn-25a6b1a6=1
ILLUSTRATION 12: Bloomberg report on Tether
The same thing seems to be happening with stablecoin issuer Tether, which impressed many sound-money people by backing its stablecoins with gold but lately has begun lending its gold and investing in and lending silver as well:
How many places can Tether’s gold and silver occupy at the same time? How much real, unencumbered metal is backing Tether stablecoins? How safe are those stablecoins really?
Now that Tether is lending its gold and silver, Tether stablecoin holders may have to guess where the metal is.
But it looks like the United States will be getting more real gold - Venezuela’s gold - as well as that country’s oil.
Since the U.S. abducted the Venezuelan dictator, Nicholas Maduro, last March, the Trump administration has allowed importation of gold mined in Venezuela, though Venezuela’s gold industry is largely controlled by gangsters.
ILLUSTRATION 13: Spanish report on Venezuelan gold
Now an agreement appears to be near between the United States, the Rodriguez government in Venezuela, and Venezuela’s democratic opposition to transfer the country’s official gold reserves from the Bank of England to the United States, which is more or less colonizing Venezuela.
The idea is to let the U.S. have custody of Venezuela’s gold reserves and liquidate the metal gradually in exchange for U.S. dollars to be given to the Venezuelan government for earthquake relief:
https://www.gata.org/node/24930
You may remember that a year ago President Trump and his erstwhile adviser Elon Musk repeatedly declared they wanted to audit the U.S. gold reserve at Fort Knox. Then, suddenly, they stopped talking about a gold audit and never commissioned one. The organizer of this conference, Gold Newsletter Publisher Brien Lundin, speculated sardonically that the president and Musk realized that there couldn’t be an audit of the U.S. gold reserves until the gold that had been surreptitiously sold, leased, or swapped was returned to Fort Knox or otherwise accounted for.
But the Venezuelan gold - 31 tonnes - could help fill any gaps in Fort Knox.
ILLUSTRATION 14: Netherlands National Bank
Or maybe the 31 tonnes of Venezuelan gold will be deposited at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which should have some extra room since last month the central bank of the Netherlands moved 78 tonnes of its gold out of the United States, bringing some of it home and putting some of it in London:
https://www.dnb.nl/en/general-news/press-release-2026/dnb-improves-tradability-of-gold-reserves/
The Netherlands central bank said the transfers were made so the bank might have more “tradability” in a world financial crisis. But many observers wondered if the Netherlands was just getting its gold out of the United States while it still could, what with the United States lately doing so much freezing of foreign assets and sanctioning of foreign businesses:
https://www.gata.org/node/24961
https://www.gata.org/node/24962
ILLUSTRATION 15: FT on China’s Treasuries
But the most important development with gold over the past year has been the disclosure of China’s long-term plans for it.
China has been diminishing its holdings of U.S. Treasury bonds and steadily increasing its holdings of gold, both publicly and surreptitiously:
https://www.ft.com/content/69f02abc-e0dc-46e5-aa6c-61d209e095d9?syn-25a6b1a6=1
ILLUSTRATION 16: SCMP on Shanghai exchange
China has reduced retail trading of gold futures and has encouraged ordinary investors to hold real metal instead, particularly through gold accumulation plans at banks. Those banks are believed to hold large amounts of the metal quite apart from the gold reserves acknowledged by the central bank, the People’s Bank of China.
China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange is also believed to hold much gold surreptitiously.
ILLUSTRATION 17: Discovery/Alert on China’s retreat from paper gold
China also is connecting the Shanghai Gold Exchange with the Hong Kong Exchange and with gold vaults in that city, effectively making the Chinese currency - the renminbi or yuan - conveniently convertible to gold and thereby internationalizing the currency:
https://www.gata.org/node/24950
ILLUSTRATION 18: SCMP on China’s gold strategy
China’s objective goes beyond internationalizing the yuan. China also aims to destroy the fractional-reserve, derivatives-based gold and commodities price-suppression system in the West and to replace it with a system based on pricing of actual metal and other commodities available for immediate delivery. In this way China intends to transform itself from a price taker to a price maker.
For the foreseeable future Chinese policy, along with continued gold accumulation by central banks in other countries, may put a strong floor under the gold price.
Gold’s friends will welcome the destruction of “paper gold” and gold derivatives. But how much should we welcome increased Chinese influence around the world while China remains a brutally totalitarian country?
Of course it’s a fair question as to how much the United States is still a better influence in the world than China is. At least the United States isn’t yet harvesting bodily organs from political prisoners. But how much safer and fairer will the world be when China runs the currency and commodity markets?
I would prefer not to have to spend my remaining years trying to get someone to translate the documents of international market manipulation from Mandarin and Cantonese into English.
ILLUSTRATION 19: Kitco page
Gold’s friends have been encouraged this year by the growing speculation about some kind of an official revaluation of gold - an international revaluation or a revaluation just by the U.S. government. Revaluation has been done a few times before and some central banks explicitly provide for it in their rulebooks. But if an official revaluation happens, it probably will be mainly a bookkeeping maneuver to improve the solvency of governments that have huge debt but also substantial gold reserves.
ILLUSTRATION 20: FT on gold revaluation
In recent decades the U.S. government has valued its gold reserves at $42.22 per ounce, a tiny fraction of gold’s market price. If the official U.S. valuation was changed to, say, the market valuation, then the U.S Treasury Department, the owner of the U.S. gold reserve, could instruct the Federal Reserve, which holds equivalent gold certificates from the Treasury, to change the value of the certificates accordingly and to credit the Treasury’s general account at the Fed with the increased gold valuation in dollars. Then the Treasury could spend from the much-increased balance of its general account at the Fed.
With a high enough revaluation of the Treasury gold certificates at the Fed, the Treasury could repay the entire federal government debt.
Gold revaluation would not automatically change the valuation of privately held gold unless the government started transacting in gold at the revalued price. But gold revaluation undertaken by simple bookkeeping would push the market price of gold higher insofar as it would represent enormous money creation.
If the new money was used to repay government debt, it would constitute debt monetization, and so it would increase inflation and inflationary expectations and devalue the dollar.
But this is nothing for gold’s friends to count on.
So what can gold’s friends count on?
If, from the historical documents and recent financial news, people realize that governments long have worked hard to suppress the price of gold, why shouldn’t investors be discouraged from having anything to do with gold?
There are several reasons not to be discouraged about gold.
First, as indicated by the obsession central banks have with gold, gold’s friends should see by now that gold is the secret knowledge of the financial universe. Gold remains what it long has been and likely always will be - not only universal money but, just as important, money without counterparty risk, money that cannot be created quite as easily as other forms of money, money that offers protection to individuals against irresponsible government, money that defends individual liberty.
So of course few governments have wanted people to have this knowledge about gold.
ILLUSTRATION 21: Greenspan
As Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan testified to Congress in 1999: “Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world. Fiat money, in extremis, is accepted by nobody. Gold is always accepted.”
Of course while Greenspan was a gold standard advocate who wrote the vital essay, “Gold and Economic Freedom,” in 1966 -
https://constitution.org/1-Activism/mon/greenspan_gold.htm
- when he got to the Fed he helped manage the U.S. government’s gold price suppression policy.
High office often does get in the way of one’s ideals. But if Greenspan betrayed his ideals, he couldn’t unwrite his essay. Indeed, even while he chaired the Fed, Greenspan said he stood by that essay.
Second, gold’s friends can count on the long-term trends for gold and government currencies. Over the long term government currencies always devalue against gold. For there is seldom enough civic and political virtue for any country to maintain an irredeemable currency without causing inflation that eventually becomes catastrophic.
ILLUSTRATION 22: Jim Rickards on CNBC
And third, gold’s friends can count on the world continuing to move in gold’s direction - and to be seen moving toward gold.
Seventeen years ago, in September 2009, market analyst and author Jim Rickards went on CNBC and said: “When you own gold you’re fighting every central bank in the world.”
https://www.gata.org/node/7835
Back then people who complained about gold price suppression by central banks were ridiculed. Today there is less ridicule as central banks, apart from the Federal Reserve, transition from selling and leasing gold to acquiring it for their reserves - and not just acquiring it but announcing their acquisitions and even announcing the reduction in their holdings of U.S. Treasuries.
ILLUSTRATION 23: OMFIF on gold’s return as monetary collateral
Unlike 17 years ago, today many major central banks are on gold’s side, presumably seeing it as the only alternative to the U.S. dollar and U.S. Treasuries as monetary reserves, seeing gold as the only escape from U.S. government sanctions and asset freezes.
So today when you own gold you’re betting WITH many central banks, rather than against them - betting on the collapse of the vast and uncoverable short position in gold, the collapse of the Western-engineered fractional-reserve “paper gold” derivatives scheme that has been in operation for 50 years.
ILLUSTRATION 24: Contact info
We are living in the age of infinite money creation, where major countries, having become welfare states whose politics produces irresistible pressure for more welfare, have lost all financial restraint and have incurred unpayable debt, debt that can be extinguished only by currency devaluation.
Government in the West has become what the French economist and statesman Frederic Bastiat perceived almost two centuries ago: “the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else.”
But infinite money creation is even worse than that. It is also infinite government and infinite power, and infinite power is infinite corruption and tyranny.
In the struggle against those things we’re not likely to get much help from mainstream financial news organizations. Most are prohibited from addressing the gold market manipulation issue, and while the gold market often exhibits stunningly anomalous behavior, mainstream financial journalism will always contrive an explanation for it, sometimes contradictory explanations, and never inquire about government intervention.
As former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul told the New York Times in April: “When it comes to gold, nobody tells the truth.”
Nobody in mainstream financial journalism anyway:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/28/world/americas/us-mint-gold-program-ron-paul.html
Since you’ll have to look elsewhere for the truth, please consider GATA.
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SILVER’S CORRECTION ISN’T OVER! -NorthStar’s Kevin Wadsworth
