At 8:30 a.m. this morning, 10 minutes after the Comex gold pit opens, over 70 tons of gold was dropped into the entire Comex trading system.  If this happened on the NYSE, one of the ECN’s (usually BATS) would have mysteriously “broke” and trading would have been halted – before the damaging effects of the systemic paper overload hit the market.

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From 8:30 to 9:30 a.m. EST, a total of 6,289,900 ozs of paper gold, or 196.5 tons was unloaded on the Comex.   To put this in perspective, the Comex is reporting 2.37 million ounces of gold in its registered account (the gold that can be delivered).  That amount of paper gold that would unloaded was 2.7x the amount of gold available to be delivered.   It represents 58% of the entire amount of gold reported to be in Comex vaults.

It’s hard to find any specific news trigger that would have motivated anyone to sell one ounce of gold, let alone nearly 3x the amount of physical gold available to be delivered.

Perhaps the worst economic news reported was retail sales, which dropped .3% in August vs. the expectation of no change.  This is the 4th month in a row retail sales have dropped on monthly sequential basis.  Retail sales have declined 6 out of 8 months this year.

There’s probably nothing to see in that chart above – just like the allegations of Hillary’s poor health…