LBMA Board Members Jumping Ship As Bullion Banks’ Gold Scheme Unravels. (Uncut) 03-10-2025

LBMA Board Members Jumping Ship As Bullion Banks’ Gold Scheme Unravels.

He once penned a letter defending London’s over-the-counter gold market as offering unmatched flexibility. Well, there’s unmatched flexibility because you create gold out of thin air, Mr. Vohler. It seems to me that this unmatched flexibility has come back to bite you, you know where? Monday, March 10th, 2025, Marneco 64, Home of Alternative Economics and Contrarian Views.

So I think the LBMA problems are way from being over. I think the LBMA has also been very secretive with its information. And yes, I know I reported on the problems at the LBMA, the shortage at the Bank of England that requires it to delay delivery for a spot to four to eight weeks back in January.

That was January 29th. I always remember that date, very important date. But what if the problems in the LBMA have been going on for a lot longer than we know, and we’re just getting drips and drabs of information? I think we need to think along those lines.

And it’s with that today that I’m going to cover the LBMA board and whether, yeah, the board members there are jumping ship because they know what’s coming. They know that it’s the end of the paper game and that the price of gold is going to go through the roof and that this scheme of basically operating as a bucket shop. That’s what the LBMA is, a bucket shop.

So we’ll look at that today. And then we’ll look at the markets. They look quite interesting already this morning.

Before we go deeper into the LBMA, I just want to thank all of you, all the new subscribers, well, all the existing subscribers and supporters of the channel. I really appreciate it. And if you do enjoy my content but haven’t yet subscribed, think about subscribing.

And yes, thanks again. So I remember a few years ago that the LBMA AM and PM fix, they used to issue the prices of those fixings, like 15, 20 minutes, maybe an hour afterwards, it used to come up on the screens. When I was at work, I would see that on my Reuters screen.

And then eventually they removed that service, that transparency, so to speak. And now it takes, I think, 24 hours for to publish the fixings. So the LBMA is not a very transparent organization.

And it’s not really an exchange. It’s just a self-regulated association of bullion banks operating out of London and high paid lawyers. And why do they need so many lawyers? Well, because their business, in my opinion, is very shady.

I spoke about earlier in this video that they operate like a bucket shop. And what is a bucket shop? Well, I’ve spoken about it a few times in relationship to Jesse Livermore when he started out as a boy plunger, so to speak. As a teenager, he started out working at a stock brokerage firm in Boston.

He used to be writing the prices on the board. And of course, he got interested in the game. But he didn’t have enough money to have a brokerage account.

So he went to the bucket shops. And the bucket shops just used to be criminal organizations run by the underworld kingpins like Arnold Rothstein, the guy who was famous for the Black Sox scandal. And all the bucket shops were gambling parlors where they bet on the prices of stocks.

You didn’t actually buy and sell the stock and they put like a 10 percent stop on your trade because it was highly leveraged. And they closed your trade out. So the house won most of the time.

But what I’m trying to say here is that Jesse Livermore wasn’t buying U.S. steel or whatever other stock there was at the time. He was betting on the price. And it’s the same thing with the LBMA.

It’s maybe a little less bad than the bucket shop, but it operates, I would say, mostly as a bucket shop because it does do some kind of physical delivery. But the preponderance of the trades are paper. And I think what’s been happening since the end of last year and maybe even before, and we don’t know because the information out of that organization is not very transparent.

What’s been happening is that finally, people on COMEX, through this EFP mechanism, they’ve been withdrawing real physical from the LBMA. And that’s why the Bank of England still cannot deliver physical real gold in the spot transaction, which is really, I give you the cash, you give me the gold in a day or two or three, you deliver it. They’re still waiting for four to eight weeks.

Yes, they’re trying to get other central banks to lease their gold to the participants so they can. Yeah, it’s a mess, right? But the problem is that the LBMA and the COMEX to some extent, because the COMEX is a futures market and there are COMEX vaults, so to speak, registered and eligible. But as I’ve said many times, and I worked as a futures broker for 20 years, and even though I didn’t trade for my clients gold and silver all of the time, I did do some gold and silver trading for some clients.

And I can tell you, I asked one of my bosses once, what if we take delivery of gold and silver, would that be okay? And he looked at me and just said, forget about it, right? So it’s not just an LBMA problem, it’s a COMEX problem. So I think this problem has been going on for longer than we’ve been told. And why do I say that? Well, because last week, I saw the story, it came out on March 7th, so Friday, out of Bloomberg.

It says HSBC’s head of precious metals, Paul Vohler, retires from bank. It says lender is major player in gold market with vault in London. Vohler led HSBC’s precious metals business for past 12 years.

HSBC holdings PLC, head of precious metals, Paul Vohler has retired from the bank, one of the leading players in the global gold market, well, paper gold market. According to people familiar with the matter, Vohler, who joined the lender in London directly from school in 1984, had led HSBC’s precious metals business from New York for the past 12 years. He retired last month, so he retired in February.

One of the people said, asking not to be identified as the information isn’t public. HSBC is one of just four clearing members whose vaults underpin tens of billions of dollars a day in trades in the London gold market, along with JPMorgan Chase, UBS, and ICBC Standard Bank. The lender says little publicly about its precious metals business, yet its scale was laid bare in 2020 when HSBC revealed a mark to market loss of around 200 million in one day, thanks to an extreme price dislocation between London and New York caused by the pandemic.

Well, we’re told by the people who criticize us for bringing this up, for trying to put a spotlight on the LBMA and bullying banks, that bullying banks are always hedged, right? So if you’re fully hedged, how can you lose 200 million dollars in a day? Just put that out there. It says, however, the divergence soon became an opportunity for banks such as HSBC, as they shipped bullying to the U.S. to capture the price premium, a dynamic that’s been repeated in the recent months. Well, they’re trying to equate what’s going on now to what happened during the pandemic, but I think that’s not really the same thing.

Vohler has been a board director of the London Bullying Market Association since 2019. This I find really interesting too. It says he once penned a letter defending London’s over-the-counter gold market as offering unmatched flexibility.

Well, there’s unmatched flexibility because you create gold out of thin air, Mr. Vohler. It seems to me that this unmatched flexibility has come back to bite you, you know, where. Anyways, it says here at the end, he has not been replaced, but the precious metals division continues to be overseen by Richard Anthony, HSBC’s head of FX E-Risk and Commodities, one of the people said.

So, all well and good. And then I saw, I think, later on on Friday, someone posted on Next that another LBMA board member had left the LBMA. This one, though, didn’t work for a bullying bank.

So, the story actually, I found it, and it actually came out on the 27th of February from Bloomberg. So, it looks like Bloomberg is definitely trying to get information out of the LBMA. Deputy chief of London Golds Association is leaving for startup.

So, it says the deputy chief executive of the London Bullion Market Association, the de facto global standard bearer, the standard setter for precious metals market, is leaving to join a startup that’s launching, wait for it, a gold fund. Why do I think that’s significant? Well, maybe this person knows something we don’t know that’s been happening in the gold market. Maybe this person knows why all that physical gold is flowing to the USA.

Who knows? Just a thought. So, this person is Sakila Mirza. She’s joining a startup that’s backed by a family office.

She said by email, without naming the company, she has been at the trade body for a decade. One of the reasons why I think the LBMA is not being quite honest with us is that if you bring up the LBMA website and you go to the LBMA board, we still have Sakila Mirza as deputy chief executive and general counsel. She’s still there even though she’s left last month.

And we still have Paul Voller, managing director, global head of precious metals HSBC. So, we got Bloomberg telling us these two individuals have left, but the LBMA is portraying them as still being there. So, as you can see, the LBMA is not really being too transparent.

And in this instance, I have to thank Bloomberg for bringing out these stories. And we haven’t seen any retractions or denials by these two board members. And I think this is very telling what’s going on there.

And these people know a lot more than we’re being told. So, let’s quickly look at the markets. It’s 8.40 a.m. London time.

We’ll start with gold and silver. They’re down slightly. They’ve just come off in the last 20 minutes or so.

Gold is at 29.04 down 0.2 of a percent. High has been 19 and the low 01. Silver is only down 5 cents.

So, down less than 0.2 at 32.50. High has been 69. The low has been 31. But what’s more interesting is that the stock market remains quite weak.

We’ve got the Dow down 0.7 of a percent or 300 points. The NASDAQ 100 index is back below 20,000, down 1% as well or 200 points. And the S&P is down 50 points, just under 1%.

So, I saw President Trump gave an interview, had an interview with Maria Bartiromo. I think she’s at Fox now. And he said, we need to think more like the Chinese.

We need to think in terms of 100 year plans, so to speak, not quarter by quarter, and that he’s not concerned about the stock market. He’s concerned about fixing the fundamentals for the country in the next, yeah, maybe next 100 years. Maybe he’s looking at, like he talked about a base for the economy, maybe, or a foundation.

Maybe he’s looking at a gold foundation, and maybe that’s why all that gold is going to the US. Who knows? The currencies, actually, the dollar is a little stronger versus the pound. The pound is down a quarter of a percent.

The euro is down an eighth. The dollar, though, is down versus the yen. That’s not a good thing, a strengthening yen, because of the carry trade.

Carry trade is when people borrow in yen, and with the proceeds, they buy assets. But if the yen is striking, that’s not good. So, the dollar is down over half a percent.

The general commodities are pretty much unchanged, with the exception of natural gas, which is up 5%. We’ll quickly, excuse me, quickly look at the bond market here. The 10-year yield is down seven basis points at 425.

And I think that’s based on what President Trump said. He’s not concerned about the economy, well, the market, I mean. And he also said that there’s a chance of a recession.

He wouldn’t be surprised. So, that’s helping bonds right now. So, with that, I’m going to wish you all a very good day.

Take care. Bye.