Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
The 2025-26 annual report of the Bank for International Settlements, the central bank of the central banks, was published a week ago —
https://www.bis.org/about/
— and GATA’s consultant on the bank, Robert Lambourne, has reviewed it incisively. Predictably enough, he has underemphasized the detail that may be of most interest to those who follow GATA: the bank’s validation of his monthly calculations of the bank’s surreptitious interventions in the gold market via gold swaps undertaken by its central bank members.
The volume of those swaps can be calculated, as Lambourne calculates them, from the bank’s monthly statements of account, but they are totaled explicitly only in the bank’s annual report. The BIS’ gold swaps continue to be the most contemporaneous evidence of monthly and perhaps even daily interventions in gold by central banks, and the new annual report shows again that Lambourne’s calculations have been correct,
Tellingly, the BIS refuses to explain the purposes and objectives of its gold swaps and the parties to them.
While the bank celebrates itself in its new annual report, outsiders should remember that the bank’s objectives go far beyond its stated ones — “the pursuit of price stability and a resilient financial system” — and include keeping the world ignorant of how central banks are striving in secret to control its money and the value of all the world’s capital, labor, goods, and services. Nothing could be more undemocratic.
Lambourne’s summary of the BIS annual report is appended.
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
[email protected]
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Robert Lambourne’s notes on the 2025-26 annual report of the Bank for International Settlements
1. In his introductory remarks, the new general manager of the BIS, Pablo Hernandez de Cos, made the following point: “Net profit was Special Drawing Rights 1,018 million, while total comprehensive income ended the financial year at a record level of SDR 4.7 billion.”
The major contributor to the record comprehensive income of SDR 4.7 billion was a gain of SDR 3.47 billion or 74% from gold price appreciation.
The general manager does not mention this dominant component of the bank’s record comprehensive income. So yet again the importance of gold price gains is not highlighted. The impact of the gold price gain is more than three times the profit earned by the BIS in the financial year. This is hardly balanced reporting.
Highly amusingly, the general manager uses plenty of words to emphasize that the BIS is going to renew itself. This doesn’t seem to extend to highlighting the importance of the bank’s own gold in the bank’s financial results.
2. The annual report confirms that the BIS still holds 102 tonnes of gold for its own account at the balance sheet date of March 31, 2026.
3. The bank’s gold swaps are reported to be 184 tonnes as of March 31, 3 tonnes higher than what GATA estimated when the bank’s monthly statement of account for March was published in June:
https://www.gata.org/node/24732
This discrepancy is due to the gold price used by GATA for the estimate, drawn from USAGold.com, was slightly different from the gold price quoted in SDRs.
4. The report also enables a reader to conclude that the swapped gold comes from non-central bank gold holdings. For some time GATA has conjectured that this gold is sourced from gold exchange-traded funds, where a bullion bank is acting as custodian of the gold held by the ETF.
5. The annual report also reports on the allocated gold held by the BIS on behalf of central banks, which was up 14 tonnes to 460 tonnes. This gold is held in earmarked accounts and is not treated as a BIS asset but is held on behalf of the central bank clients of the BIS. Since the BIS has no vault of its own, this gold will be vaulted at a central bank and held in BIS earmarked accounts.
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Robert Lambourne is a retired business executive in the United Kingdom who consults for GATA about the Bank for International Settlements and U.S. government debt.
Read the full article here