JPMorgan Corners LME Aluminum Market, Leading To Strange “Price Anomalies”

While not nearly as exciting as JPM cornering and manipulating the gold or silver markets, over the past few years Jamie Dimon’s bank appears to have cornered a very prominent commodity traded on the London Metals Exchange, aluminum, resulting in price “anomalies” which as Reuters politely puts it “mean prices do not always reflect fundamentals” and which as we put it, reflect outright manipulation, however because regulators are captured have so far completely slipped through the cracks.
According to Reuters, large amounts of aluminum traded on the London Metal Exchange over the past couple of years “have at times been in the hands of a dominant position holder.” Citing sources at commodity trading houses, warehouses, producers, brokers and banks “one such position holder is U. S. bank JPMorgan.”
Reuters adds that “other companies have done so in past” which perhaps is meant to mitigate JPM’s culpability, but merely confirms that if it isn’t one bank manipulating commodity markets, it’s another – the famous example of Sumitomo’s Yasuo “Mr. Copper” Hamanaka comes to mind.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on 03/15/2016.