JPMORGAN CHASE AND COMPANY
JPMorgan plans to build a 70-story office building in Manhattan. Their current 56-story unit will be demolished to make way for the $3 ½ billion dollar project. According to one silver analyst, if JPMorgan owns 700 million ounces of silver, a $5 price rise in the price of silver would pay for the new building. Not that they need it. JPMorgan has assets of $2 ½ trillion. They have almost $3 trillion in assets under management and $24 trillion under custody and administration. They are the fourth largest public company and the second most valuable bank in the world by market capitalization. Their hedge fund is the second largest in the world.
How they acquired the largest private hoard of silver ever known harkens back to the failure of Bear Stearns in 2008. At that time few analysts ever bothered to check the monthly Bank Participation Report because it rarely changed. Silver analyst Theodore Butler is one who did (because he is incredibly thorough). Nobody knew at the time that Bear Stearns was the big silver short. This fact did not show in the Bank Participation Report because Bearn Stearns was an investment bank and not a commercial bank. In August of 2008 shortly after JPMorgan took over Bear Stearns, the Bank Participation Report showed a huge increase in the silver short position of a U.S. commercial bank. Ted Butler was so shocked and excited by this revelation he could not sleep that night. Immediately he concluded the big short was JPMorgan and this fact was later confirmed by letters from the CFTC to various congressmen who had requested this information.
Three years later, Ted Butler noticed that in addition to their huge paper short position, JPMorgan was adding physical silver. Now he began to track JPMorgan’s every move. He reported on the buildup of physical silver in their commodity warehouse. He explained how a large entity was carefully extracting large quantities of silver from the ETF in a manner that did not have to be reported. He suggested that somebody was buying millions of ounces of silver coins and likely melting them into 1,000 ounce bars. He showed that JPM was taking delivery on futures contracts. He reported on a massive weekly turnover of physical silver going in and out of commodity warehouses, something unheard of in any other commodity.
Recently, the London Bullion Merchants Association claimed that one billion ounces of silver are stored under its auspices. JPMorgan was a custodian for a large quantity of that silver which they transferred out of their London warehouse, most likely to make room for their own silver. Everything fits together when analyzing the evidence and facts surrounding Ted Butler’s conclusion that JPMorgan owns 700 million ounces of physical silver.
Additional proof lies in the fact that Mr. Butler has sent the officers and directors of JPMorgan hundreds of his newsletters accusing them of manipulating the price of silver and breaking the law. If Mr. Butler’s accusations of crime by JPMorgan were untrue, they would likely have reacted differently and had their lawyer threaten him. The fact that they never contacted him indicates they are probably doing what he says they are.
It’s just a theory, but it’s possible that in 2008 JPMorgan made a deal with the U.S. government to have its way in the gold and silver market for a period of years. At the time the financial markets were in a near panic because of the Bear Stearns collapse and the spreading crisis in mortgage backed securities. Something has to explain the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s lack of oversight or action against what Mr. Butler calls a massive manipulation. Perhaps the government granted JPMorgan a free hand in precious metals for as many as ten years. If so, that time is up in March of this year. Inevitably, the gold and silver markets will reward JPMorgan with perhaps the greatest profits ever known. Everybody should want to benefit from this along with the big bank.