A visit today to the website of ICE Benchmark Administration (IBA), which now runs the new London gold benchmarking process on behalf of the LBMA, confirms there are now seven Direct Participants in the LBMA Gold Price with JP Morgan now joining Barclays, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Scotiabank, SocGen, and UBS in the setting of the twice daily gold benchmark. Talk about ‘The Usual Suspects’!

If any bank selection could be guaranteed to inflame those within the gold bull community who preach gold price manipulation, it would be the addition of JP Morgan, following that of Goldman Sachs and UBS, over the original four members of the old London Gold Fixing panel.

A cynic might suggest the LBMA and ICE might have made the selection of the participants to deliberately rile GATA and its supporters as all the above banks are those widely reckoned by the gold price manipulation theorists to be controlling the gold price for their own ends and for those of some allied central banks. Manna for the conspiracy theorists!

And still there are no Chinese banks involved. Will there ever be? Until the benchmarking process participants are widened to include entities from outside the Western banking elite, the process will remain suspect in the eyes of those who feel that there are no level playing fields in the global financial markets – if indeed there ever were!