{"id":51929,"date":"2020-03-24T13:54:25","date_gmt":"2020-03-24T18:54:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=51929"},"modified":"2020-03-24T13:54:29","modified_gmt":"2020-03-24T18:54:29","slug":"the-gold-market-is-breaking-down-gold-spreads-explode-as-lbma-warns-of-liquidity-problems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=51929","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;The Gold Market Is Breaking Down&#8221;: Gold Spreads Explode As LBMA Warns Of Liquidity Problems"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/commodities\/gold-market-breaking-down-gold-spreads-explode-lbma-warns-liquidity-problems\">&#8220;The Gold Market Is Breaking Down&#8221;: Gold Spreads Explode As LBMA Warns Of Liquidity Problems<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Last night,&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/commodities\/its-selling-toilet-paper-if-you-havent-bought-physical-gold-yet-its-probably-too-late\">when observing&nbsp;<\/a>the unprecedented &#8220;gold run&#8221; on precious metals dealers which has left all gold vendors with little to no physical gold, we said that &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/commodities\/price-physical-gold-decouples-paper-gold\">the price of physical gold has decoupled from paper gold<\/a>&#8221; as a result of paper gold liquidations as leveraged funds scramble to cover margin calls using safe assets&#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b792-20bd8d8fa069.storage.googleapis.com\/s3fs-public\/inline-images\/gold%20sold%20to%20provide%20liquidity.jpg\" alt=\"\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&#8230; resulting in an arbitrage that physical gold buyers, i.e., those who&nbsp;<strong><em>don&#8217;t have faith in gold ETFs&nbsp;<\/em><\/strong>such as the GDX or simply prefer to have possession of the metal, find especially delightful as it allows them to buy physical gold at&nbsp;<strong>lower&nbsp;<\/strong>prices than they would ordinarily have access to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">However, we also noted that whereas in the past such conditions were self-correcting, this time it is not only a record surge in demand for physical gold but also a near shut down in supply as the most productive gold refiners, those located in the southern Swiss town of Ticina, namely Valcambi, Pamp and Argor-Heraeus, now appear to be offline indefinitely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The result is that the spot\/futures price divergence discussed last night and further&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/commodities\/price-physical-gold-decouples-paper-gold\">described here,&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/a>has exploded&#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b792-20bd8d8fa069.storage.googleapis.com\/s3fs-public\/inline-images\/2020-03-24%20%281%29.jpg\" alt=\"\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&#8230; and on Tuesday morning the divergence that was barely noticeable late Monday has blown out to unprecedented level, with gold futures decoupling and trading far above spot prices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b792-20bd8d8fa069.storage.googleapis.com\/s3fs-public\/inline-images\/2020-03-24.jpg\" alt=\"\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The near record spread is the widest seen in four years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b792-20bd8d8fa069.storage.googleapis.com\/s3fs-public\/inline-images\/2020-03-24%20%282%29.jpg\" alt=\"\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As Kitko notes, just\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.kitco.com\/news\/2020-03-24\/Huge-spreads-occurring-in-gold-backwardation-reflects-strong-demand.html\">before noon EDT<\/a>, one price vendor was showing spot metal was trading at $1,612.10 an ounce while at the same time showing the Comex April futures were at $1,654.10 an ounce \u2013 a spread of $42 an ounce. It was much wider earlier in the day, when as Kitco adds, &#8220;nearby futures were more expensive than deferred, a sign of strong demand in any commodity market.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;The Gold Market Is Breaking Down&#8221;: Gold Spreads Explode As LBMA Warns Of Liquidity Problems Last night,&nbsp;when observing&nbsp;the unprecedented &#8220;gold run&#8221; on precious metals dealers which has left all gold vendors with little to no physical gold, we said that &#8220;the price of physical gold has decoupled from paper gold&#8221; as a result of paper [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[374,15877,17628,4318],"class_list":["post-51929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-gold","tag-gold-etf","tag-lbma","tag-zerohedge"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51929"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51930,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51929\/revisions\/51930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}