GFMS Sees Bright Side Of BIS Swap

Last week, when the gold market took notice of the Bank of International Settlement's swap, the predominant reaction was fear. Yesterday, the GFMS chair put a positive spin on the revelation:

The 346 tonnes of gold swap operations conducted by the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) in recent months highlight gold's central role in the financial system and are unlikely to lead to dumping of the metal on the market, GFMS chairman Philip Klapwijk said....

"Here we have gold being used quite creatively," Klapwijk told Reuters Insider television. "That is in a sense a validation again of gold's centrality to the financial system."

Klapwijk's own guess as to who the counterparty was, is cash-strapped European commercial banks. He said that the amount swapped, although large, would be small for a central bank. In addition, a gold swap is an easy way to secure money that's hard to come by through more conventional means.


Again, I point to the fact that the swap was undertaken before the March 31st cut-off date for the BIS' fiscal year, before the Eurocrisis flared up.