It's that time again when we cautiously peek at cell H25 of the daily CME Group Metal Depository [2]Statistics worksheet to find if, following Friday's dramatic and volatile trading session in gold, someone, anyone decided to submit a delivery ticket to the JPM vault located at 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza, and reduce the already near record low gold inventory which at last check was just over 5 tons, and just one 163K troy ounce delivery request would lead to all commercial gold at the JPM vault to run down to zero. Not this time.
As it turns, in a carbon copy of Friday's internal conversion, in which 17.5k ounces of gold were [3]selectively converted from Registered to Eligible status (for all those sticklers about nomenclature definition, this is how easy it is to convert one into the other and vice versa and how meaningless said designations really are), on Friday JPM decided to do some more redefinition, and converted another 4.7k ounces of gold from registered into eligible, pushing up the total by a fractional amount to 163.8k ounces, still just a hair's breath away from the all time record low reported last Thursday [4].
And as a tangent, it is perhaps just as notable that HSBC just saw 76K ounces of its registered gold, or 17% of the total gold stored underneath Bryant Park, exit through the front door, destination unknown, leaving just 378K ounces of registered gold with the London-headquartered bank best known for aiding and abetting international money laundering, without admitting or denying it of course.
The second daily internal conversion in a row:
[5]
And the total JPM eligible gold as reported by Comex:
[6]
Thus, we look forward to tomorrow's update to see how much more "registered" gold JPM will convert into eligible, or if nobody will continue to demand delivery after the biggest "run" on JPM's vault in history.