Tell Ea-Nasir that Nanni sends the following message. When you came, you said to me as follows : “I will give J.P. Morgan (when he comes) fine quality nickel ingots.”
Several nickel shipments uncovered as fake by the London Metal Exchange were reportedly bags of rocks.
In commodity futures trading, the joke is that if you let your futures contract expire you have to take delivery of e.g. 17 tons of pork bellies or orange juice concentrate or whatever. But actually to prevent this absurdity from ever taking place, there are warehouses full of stuff that just get credited to whichever trader happens to have let a contract expire, and then when they like, they can sell the warehouse, and it's purchased (usually by someone else letting a futures contract expire).
So the London Metals Exchange owns several such warehouses and people from all over the world do business with them, letting these warehouses change hands. J.P. Morgan & Chase Co. apparently held several warehouses of nickel for years without anyone looking too closely... and recently had several million dollars of contracts voided because the warehouses full of nickel turned out to contain at least some fraction of -- and I am not joking here -- bags of rocks.
