Ted Butler: Why Not Just Close the COMEX

This column tonight from Ted Butler at Butler Research set me back a bit. It would be like one of the most die hard economist Fed watchers, after forty years in the business, coming out and saying that the Fed has gone so far off the rails that we ought to just shut it down.

It is a subscription only site, and so I cannot do justice to his reasoning which was far more extensive and complete than what I excerpt here.

Rather than closing the COMEX, engaging in some substantial reform and bringing it back to its original purposes would be preferable. But in the current climate of financial corruption and regulatory weakness it is not practically achievable, at least not yet. 

Here is just a snippet of what Ted had to say.

"Not to be delusional, I have little expectation that the COMEX will be closed; but I think the idea has merit and should be considered. In fact, the vast majority of market participants and society as a whole would benefit from a closing of the COMEX for the simple reason that all the commodities traded there have been manipulated in price. The simplest way of ending these manipulations is to shut down the mechanism of manipulation...

Since it can be demonstrated and proven thru CFTC data that prices are set on the COMEX with no input from the real world producers or consumers, society as a whole would benefit if the COMEX didn’t exist. This is a private club that has no legitimacy in dictating to the world what prices should be.

The COMEX has undermined and replaced the free market law of supply and demand with a phony price-setting mechanism never intended when Congress authorized regulated futures trading. The COMEX is not functioning as intended and it’s hard to see what might change that. As such, it should be shut down."