As widely telegraphed over the past week, the US Justice Department and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (along with the SEC) have settled the precious metals spoofing/manipulation case which first came into view in November 2018 with the announcement of a guilty plea by a former JPMorgan trader. The total fine of $920 million was the largest in CFTC history and the settlement included a Deferred Criminal Prosecution Agreement, the third (by my count) such agreement involving precious metals manipulation (BankAmerica and Scotiabank had previously entered into DPA’s involving precious metals manipulation).
As expected, the settlement narrowly focuses on spoofing, the illegal short term trading device and not the much more serious long term suppression of silver (and gold) prices that I claim JPMorgan has been guilty of since 2008. As such, any claims by victims of JPMorgan’s illegal activities would have to show damage from very short term trading, a difficult and expensive undertaking. As I have explained previously, were the Justice Department and CFTC to have alleged a long term suppression of prices by JPMorgan that would have, effectively, put the bank out of business – period. Accordingly, no such finding was possible.
