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Gold Establishment Supports Central Bank Secrecy instead of Exposing it
Gold Establishment Supports Central Bank Secrecy instead of Exposing it
This week, the World Gold Council (WGC), which is a gold market development organization representing 32 of the world’s gold mining companies, published the latest quarterly edition of it’s well-known “Gold Demand Trends” research publication.
In the latest edition, which is titled “Gold Demand Trends Q3 2022”, the World Gold Council claims that during Q3 2022, “central banks continued to accumulate gold, with purchases estimated at a quarterly record of nearly 400 tonnes.”
And for my Next Trick
According to the WGC:
“Global central bank purchases leapt to almost 400 tonnes in Q3 (+115% q-o-q). This is the largest single quarter of demand from this sector in our records back to 2000 and almost double the previous record of 241t in Q3 2018.
It also marks the eighth consecutive quarter of net purchases and lifts the y-t-d total to 673 tonnes, higher than any other full year total since 1967.”
Specifically, the World Gold Council claims that Q3 2022 central bank gold demand was 399.3 tonnes, which is a massive 340% higher than Q3 2021.
Sounding impressive enough, the world’s financial media not surprisingly ran with the soundbite, publishing articles with headlines such as “Record central bank buying lifts global gold demand, WGC says” and “Central bank gold purchases set an all-time high” and “Central banks are buying gold at the fastest pace in 55 years”.
Until that is, you read a bit further and see that the World Gold Council added a caveat for Q 3 2022 central bank gold demand, saying that for “Q3 net demand includes a substantial estimate for unreported purchases”.
Wait, what was that? The Q3 gold buying from central banks includes “a substantial estimate for unreported purchases”?…
…click on the above link to read the rest…
Russian Ruble relaunched linked to Gold and Commodities – RT.com Q and A
Russian Ruble relaunched linked to Gold and Commodities – RT.com Q and A
With Russia’s central bank having just profoundly altered the international trade and monetary system by linking the Russian ruble to both gold and commodities, the journalists at RT.com in Moscow asked me to write a Q and A article on what these developments mean, and the ramifications of these changes on the Russian ruble, the US dollar, the gold price and the global system of currencies. This article has been published on the RT.com website here.
Regular readers will recall that I have contributed to quite a few RT.com articles before, such as about Australian gold (see BullionStar here), US Treasury gold (see BullionStar here), Poland’s gold (see RT site here), China’s gold (see RT’s Spanish site here), why buy physical gold (see RT site here), and gold price manipulation (see RT site here).
However, since RT.com is now blocked and censored in many Western locations such as the EU, UK, US and Canada, and since many readers may not be able to access the RT.com website (unless using a VPN), my Questions and Answers that are in the new RT.com article are now published here in their entirety.
Who would have thought that citizens of ‘free speech’ Western countries would need a VPN to read a Russian news site?
Why is setting a Fixed Price for Gold in Rubles significant?
By offering to buy gold from Russian banks at a fixed price of 5000 rubles per gram, the Bank of Russia has both linked the ruble to gold and, since gold trades in US dollars, set a floor price for the ruble in terms of the US dollar.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Orwellian CFTC, which ignored years of silver price manipulation, now going after Reddit Apes
Orwellian CFTC, which ignored years of silver price manipulation, now going after Reddit Apes
On Monday 1 March, an article in Bloomberg Law by CFTC connected lawyers from law firm Clifford Chance revealed that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is reportedly investigating retail silver trader activity in the silver price and that the US Department of Justice looks set to investigate as well.
Before looking at this shocker of an Orwellian development, it’s helpful to provide some context on the CFTC’s track behavior in this area and to show how hypocritical such a development would be.
Rewinding exactly one month previously to Monday 1 February, as the spot price of silver rallied to an 8-year high of just under US$ 30 per troy ounce amid heightened retail interest and the emergence of the #SilverSqueeze, it was predictable that the establishment on Wall Street and in Washington DC, an establishment with a collective vested interest in a low and suppressed silver price, would feel the heat and attempt to counteract the rally.
On the regulator front, this was demonstrated by none other than the US Government’s Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), whose acting Chairman Rostin “Russ” Behnam, released an unprecedented statement, actually on 01 February, saying that:
“The CFTC is closely monitoring recent activity in the silver markets. The Commission is communicating with fellow regulators, the exchanges, and stakeholders to address any potential threats to the integrity of the derivatives markets for silver, and remains vigilant in surveilling these markets for fraud and manipulation.”
Although a short statement from the CFTC, it signaled panic, panic on Wall Street and in Washington, that a #SilverSqueeze triggered demand surge in physical silver could pressure the supply side and thus trigger the collapse of the gigantic ongoing paper silver trading charade.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Quantum leap for banks as ABN AMRO questions gold price discovery
Quantum leap for banks as ABN AMRO questions gold price discovery
Earlier this week, an interesting article appeared on the website of the major Dutch bank ABN Amro, written by the bank’s currency and precious metals strategist, Georgette Boele.
The article, titled “A world with two gold prices?”, questions how, if gold is a safe haven asset, its price has not continued to reflect the ongoing crisis and stress in financial markets.
Boele then seeks an explanation of this puzzle in terms of a framework which consists of both safe haven gold demand and speculative gold demand, one of which reflects the purchase of physical gold (safe haven demand), and the other which speculates on the gold price via paper and synthetic gold products (speculative demand) which are not physically backed by gold.
This leads her to the observation that safe haven investors would not sell their physical gold in the midst of a crisis, as they “would think three times before parting ways with their gold”, and that it is speculative investors (those who are not invested in real physical gold) who are pushing the gold price around.
One Small Step
While the ABN AMRO strategist fails to address the reality of how the international gold price is really established, i.e. via gigantic trading volumes of fractional-reserve London unallocated gold and COMEX gold derivatives, she does take a quantum leap, at least for a prominent investment bank, when the penny drops that there are two separate things being traded. Finite tangible physical gold on the one hand, and paper gold synthetics on the other. Shouldn’t these two things have distinct prices? Boele then makes the jump:
“Let’s now go a step further. Suppose there are two gold prices: one for physical gold and one for all other non-physical gold products. How would these two gold prices behave?”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Italy’s Gold enters the Political Fray. But who really owns it?
Italy’s Gold enters the Political Fray. But who really owns it?
Italy’s unpredictable political situation continues to throw up surprises with a controversial claim in national newspaper La Stampa this week that the country’s coalition government wants to sell part of Italy’s gold reserves to cover spending plans and to prevent the need to increase VAT in a forthcoming Italian budget.
While the claims by La Stampa are not really based on anything new, they still managed to cause an international media frenzy as they came a few days after Italy’s governing coalition launched verbal attacks on Italy’s central bankers and financial regulators.
Note that Italy claims to be the world’s third largest sovereign gold holder behind the US and Germany, with claimed monetary gold holdings of 2451.8 tonnes. Interestingly, unlike most countries where sovereign gold is owned by the State but managed by the country’s central bank, the Italian gold is officially owned by Italy’s central bank, Banca d’Italia (Bank of Italy), and not owned by the Italian State.
The Banca d’Italia furthermore claims that 1199.4 tonnes of the gold (or roughly half), is stored in the Bank’s gold vaults under it’s Palazzo Koch headquarters building in Rome, with most of the other half stored in the vaults of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY), and a small balance kept the Bank of England in London, and in an account of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in the vaults of the Swiss National Bank (SNB) in Berne, Switzerland. But without any documentary evidence or independent auditing or verification of any of its gold, especially the foreign held gold, these claims are impossible to verify.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Russian Central Bank buying Gold on the International market?
Russian Central Bank buying Gold on the International market?
For a number of years now and even more so during 2018, the central bank of the Russian Federation, the Bank of Russia, has remained in the spotlight as one of the world’s largest gold buyers, each month adding substantial amounts of gold to its monetary gold stockpiles.
Having bought another 37.3 tonnes of gold (1.2 million ounces) during November, and Bank of Russia now holds 2103 tonnes of monetary gold. On a year-to-date basis (for the 11 months from January to November 2018), the Russian central bank has added an incredible 264.3 tonnes of gold to its monetary reserve assets.
A key feature of the Russian gold market is that the Bank of Russia has a policy of sourcing its gold from domestic gold mining companies by using large Russian commercial banks such as Sberbank and VTB Bank as intermediaries.
The commercial banks finance the gold mining producers with development credits and loans. The miners then repay the banks with the gold they mine. After the gold is sent for refining to Russian gold refineries, the large commercial banks sell the refined gold (in bar form) to the central bank, which in turn stores the gold bars in the Bank of Russia’s storage vaults in Moscow and St Petersburg. Sounds simple in theory and even in practice. But this model only works smoothly as long as gold demand from the central bank is less than domestic gold mine supply. When demand is greater than supply, the marginal gold demand has to be sourced elsewhere.
All the mined gold and then some
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
