What a surprise: FT says CFTC to drop silver investigation

But such an outcome would be completely consistent with a finding that the really big player in the silver market is not JPMorgan at all but the U.S. government acting through intermediary brokerage houses. After all, as he signed the legislation demonetizing silver in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson pledged that the U.S. government would rig the silver market if necessary to prevent the price from rising:

http://www.gata.org/node/11601 [5]

And the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, which created the U.S. Exchange Stabilization Fund, explicitly authorizes the U.S. treasury secretary to trade secretly in all markets on behalf of the U.S. government:

http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/international/ESF/Pages/esf-inde... [6]

* * *

Four-Year Silver Probe Set to Be Dropped

By Jack Farchy and Gregory Meyer
Financial Times, London
Sunday, August 5, 2012

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/45329d42-dd97-11e1-8be2-00144feab49a.html [7]

A four-year investigation into the possible manipulation of the the silver market looks increasingly likely to be dropped after US regulators failed to find enough evidence to support a legal case, according to three people familiar with the situation.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission announced that it was investigating "complaints of misconduct in the silver market" in September 2008, following a barrage of allegations of manipulation from a group of precious metals investors.

In 2010, Bart Chilton, a CFTC commissioner, said that he believed there had been "fraudulent efforts" to "deviously control" the silver price.

But after taking advice from two external consultancies, the first of which found irregularities on certain trading dates that it believed deserved more analysis, CFTC staff do not have sufficient evidence to bring a case, according to the people familiar with the situation.

The agency's five commissioners have not yet formally determined the outcome of the investigation, leaving the possibility that staff could be instructed to dig deeper. A CFTC spokesman said: "The investigation has not reached its conclusion." He declined further comment.

Ending the probe would infuriate some US silver investors, who claim that a group of large investment banks -- in particular, JPMorgan -- has conspired to drive the price of silver lower.

"I'm sure it will be met with some concern from a certain group of aggressive silver speculators," said one person familiar with the investigation.

In a recent blog post, Ted Butler, a newsletter publisher and unofficial champion for the silver investors, accused the CFTC of being "negligent in failing to terminate the obvious manipulation ongoing in silver."

The CFTC has analysed over 100,000 documents and interviewed dozens of witnesses since it began investigating the market in 2008, it said last year. The people familiar with the situation said the evidence included records from JPMorgan.

The conclusion of the investigation will come as a relief to JPMorgan. Although no company or individual was named in the CFTC investigation, the Wall Street bank has suffered a torrent of allegations from silver investors on the blogosphere.

One campaign exhorted sympathetic readers to "crash JPMorgan" by buying silver -- based on the assumption, which JPMorgan has repeatedly denied, that the US bank has a large bet on lower silver prices.

In addition, a class-action lawsuit has been filed against JPMorgan. Lawyers for the bank have asked a judge to dismiss it, arguing that plaintiffs "fail to identify a single trade" showing manipulation.

Blythe Masters, head of commodities at JPMorgan, in an April interview with CNBC conceded that there had been "a tremendous amount of speculation, particularly in the blogosphere, about this topic," but maintained that the bank had no large bets on silver prices.

"We have no stake in whether prices rise or decline," she said. JPMorgan declined to comment on the CFTC investigation.

Previous CFTC silver inquiries in 2004 and 2008 found no evidence of wrongdoing.

* * *

Join GATA here:

Toronto Resource Investment Conference
Thursday-Friday, September 27-28, 2012
Toronto Sheraton Centre Hotel
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
http://www.cambridgehouse.com/event/toronto-resource-investment-conferen... [8]

New Orleans Investment Conference
Wednesday-Saturday, October 24-27, 2012
Hilton New Orleans Riverside Hotel
New Orleans, Louisiana
http://www.neworleansconference.com/ [9]

* * *

Support GATA by purchasing DVDs of our London conference in August 2011 or our Dawson City conference in August 2006:

http://www.goldrush21.com/order.html [10]

Or by purchasing a colorful GATA T-shirt:

http://gata.org/tshirts [11]

Or a colorful poster of GATA's full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2009:

http://gata.org/node/wallstreetjournal [12]

Help keep GATA going

GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at:

http://www.gata.org [13]

To contribute to GATA, please visit:

http://www.gata.org/node/16 [14]