Is This Why Gold Is Spiking?

That JPMorgan has been scrambling day after day in the past week to meet gold delivery requests directed to its vault located deep under 1 CMP is no secret, at least not to our frequent readers. This peaked on Monday when, courtesy of a color-coded Comex scheme, we showed how panicked the lateral moves between various Comex gold vaults had become to preserve the illusion of physical availability.

However, as yesterday’s Comex report showed, instead of tapering, JPM was just slammed with yet another 70K delivery (registered to eligible warrant detachment), which will likely appear on either today’s or tomorrow’s settlement. And since the other gold vaults appear to have no more freely transferable gold to hand over to JPM as everyone is now scrutinizing their every move under a microscope, JPM may no longer have the option of ignoring the mess its vault is in. Which means it has one option: to start buying the metal in the open market.