World Gold Council

Demand for gold is likely to rise as the world heads towards a multi-currency reserve system under the impact of uncertainty about the stability of the dollar and the euro, the main official assets held by central banks and sovereign funds. This is the conclusion of a wide-ranging analysis of the world monetary system by Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum, (OMFIF), the global monetary think-tank, in a report commissioned by the World Gold Council, the gold industry’s market development body. The report warns of “twin shocks” to the dollar and the euro and of a “coming dollar shock” and points out how gold would be a safe haven in a dollar crisis. “Gold has a lot going for it; it correlates negatively with the greenback, and no other reserve asset seems safe from the coming dollar shock.” “The world is preparing for possible twin shocks from the parlous. position of the two main reserve currencies, the dollar and the euro... The OMFIF offers a confidential, convenient and discreet forum to a unique membership of central banks, sovereign funds, financial policy-makers and market participants who interact with them. They note that “western economies have attempted to dismantle gold's monetary role. This has failed.”

New Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s pledge to spur inflation to 2 percent at the end of the yen’s appreciation means Japanese pension funds now have to hedge against rising prices and a currency decline after two decades of stagnation. Japanese pension funds are set to diversify some of their massive holdings, worth nearly $3.4 trillion into gold bullion. Corporate pension funds in Japan will diversify 72 trillion yen in assets after domestic stocks produced little return in the past two decades, according to Daiwa Institute of Research. “Bullion’s role as an inflation hedge, long ignored by Japanese fund operators, has come under the spotlight thanks to Abe’s economic policy,” Toshima, who now works as an adviser to pension-fund operators, said in an interview today in Tokyo. “Gold may be a standard asset-class in the portfolio of Japanese pension funds as Abe’s target is realized.”

One of the Fed Chairman's most memorable lines in recent history is that "gold is not money... it is tradition." Perhaps he was merely listening to the Fed's computers, Ferbus, Edo and Sigma, which we now know form the backbone of US central planning and whose DSGE model output is usually spot on until it happens to be catastrophically wrong, on the issue. Or perhaps that is merely what one is taught (and teaches) in the Princeton economics department. Whatever the reason for Bernanke's belief, don't show him this chart from a just released "Report of the Working Group to Study the Issues Related to Gold Imports and Gold Loans by NBFCs" in India, part of a coordinated campaign to minimize Indian gold demand and imports whose direct substitution to "(un)sound money" in the country is one of the reason being attributed for the nation's high current account deficit (as reported earlier) and why the finance minister said "demand for gold must be moderated." The chart shows the staggering eightfold increase in India's gold loans "which monetize the idle gold in the country", in just four short years. In short it proves that in India, gold is the only real money, and is the only fallback option in a country where inflation is still rampant, and where even simple peasants prefer to keep their wealth not in the local paper currency, which has been losing its value aggressively in recent years, but in the shiny metal. Must be "tradition."

The U.S. federal deficit is now exceeding $1 trillion dollars every year —up from $161 billion in 2007, the last year before the financial crisis. Spending is up some $1 trillion, as outlays for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other entitlements have increased by an amount equal to the entire 2013 military budget – a budget which may again surpass the combined military expenditure of every other nation in the world. U.S. unfunded liabilities are now estimated at between $50 trillion and $100 trillion and by the end of the decade (in less than just 7 years), runaway entitlement spending will require shutting down the military or crippling many other vital domestic spending programs to head off massive deficits that will likely lead to a dollar crisis and significant inflation. No matter what deal is eventually agreed, whether before or after the new year, it will at best nibble at the edges of the trillion dollar annual deficits that are being piled up. While all the focus has been on the so called U.S. ‘fiscal cliff’, amnesia has taken hold and many market participants have forgotten about the far from resolved Eurozone debt crisis – not to mention looming debt crisis in the UK and Japan.

For the time being, the silver price is essentially set in the paper market where the daily average trade on the Comex is approximately 300 million ounces. An outrageous number when you compare it to the daily mine production of about 2 million ounces. As Bart Chilton, Commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission stated on October 26, 2010, “I believe there have been repeated attempts to influence prices in silver markets. There have been fraudulent efforts to persuade and deviously control that price. Based on what I have been told and reviewed in publicly available documents, I believe violations to the Commodity Exchange Act have taken place in the silver market and any such violation of the law in this regard should be prosecuted.” Which brings us back to the phrase “Follow the money.” In our view, it is almost inconceivable that investors would allocate as many dollars to silver as they would to gold, but that is what the data shows. The silver investment market is very small. While the dollar value of gold in the world approaches $9 trillion, the value of silver in the forms of jewelry, coins, bars and silverware is estimated at around $150 billion (5 billion ounces at $30 per ounce). This is a ratio of 60:1 in dollar terms. How long can investors continue to buy silver at the current ratios when the availability for investment is only 3:1? We are surprised that the price of silver has remained at such a depressed level compared to gold. Historically, the price ratio between gold and silver has been 16:1, when both were currencies. Today the ratio is 55:1, so what are the numbers telling us? We believe this is one of those times when smart investors will be well rewarded to “Follow the money.”

With gold and silver down this morning - following a mysterious vertical plunge last night (once again) - we thought ConvergEx's Nick Colas' timely discussion of gold was worthwhile. As he notes, Gold is the ultimate personality test for investors.  Some hate it, excoriating its adherents for their lack of faith in human ingenuity – gold has been valuable since before humans could write. And some swear by the yellow metal, in the belief that it is the last vestige of rationality in a world of financial assets manipulated by central banks and opaque trading venues.  What gets lost in the wash is that gold is a commodity and can be analyzed as such. On that basis, here is the 'Top 10' list of real-world fundamentals for gold.

Bankers have engaged in a huge misinformation campaign against gold and silver to deliberately keep people out of buying gold and silver. If you’re a newbie thinking about buying gold and silver assets for the first time ever, here’s what you need to know.

Gold fell $3.10 or 0.18% in New York yesterday and closed at $1,693.60/oz. Silver climbed to $33.24 then slid to $32.51, but finished after an afternoon rally with a loss of 0.33%.

Gold inched down on Thursday, near the monthly low reached in the prior session under pressure from a stronger greenback as players await the European Central Bank rate decision at 1245 GMT and US Initial Jobless Claims at 1330 GMT.

Physical buying of gold bullion has increased on the dip, particularly in Asia, and many are seeing these levels as a floor for prices.

In our first installment of this series we explored the concept of stock to flow in the gold markets being the key driver of supply/demand dynamics, and ultimately its price. Today we are going to explore the paper markets and, importantly, to what degree they distort upwardly the “flow” of the physical gold market. We believe the very existence of paper gold creates the illusion of physical gold flow that does not and physically cannot exist. After all, if flow determines price – and if paper flow simulates physical metal movement to a degree much larger than is possible – doesn’t it then suggest that paper flow creates an artificially low price?
Leveraged systems are based on confidence – confidence in efficient exchanges, confidence in reputable counterparties, and confidence in the rule of law. As we have learned (or should have learned) with the failures of Long Term Capital Management, Lehman Brothers, AIG, Fannie & Freddie, and MF Global – the unwind from a highly leveraged system can be sudden and chaotic. These systems function…until they don’t. CDOs were AAA... until they weren’t. Paper Gold is just like allocated, unambiguously owned physical bullion... until it’s not.

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision is an exclusive and somewhat mysterious entity that issues banking guidelines for the world’s largest financial institutions. The Committee’s latest ‘framework’, is referred to as “Basel III”. The regulators have stubbornly held to the view that AAA-government securities constitute the bulk of those high quality assets, even as the rest of the financial world increasingly realizes they are anything but that. As banks move forward in their Basel III compliance efforts, they will be forced to buy ever-increasing amounts of AAA-rated government bonds to meet liquidity and capital ratios. Add to this the additional demand for bonds from governments themselves through various Quantitative Easing programs, and we may soon have a situation where government bond yields are so low that they simply make no sense to hold at all. This is where gold comes into play. If the Basel Committee decides to grant gold a favourable liquidity profile under its proposed Basel III framework, it will open the door for gold to compete with cash and government bonds on bank balance sheets – and provide banks with an asset that actually has the chance to appreciate. The world’s non-Western central banks have already embraced this concept with their foreign exchange reserves, which are vulnerable to erosion from ‘Central Planning’ printing programs. After all – if the banks are ultimately interested in restoring stability and confidence, they could do worse than holding an asset that has gone up by an average of 17% per year for the last 12 years and represented ‘sound money’ throughout history.

Gold edged down on a Monday as speculators took their profits as prices rallied on thin volumes on Friday to their highest in a month on technical buying.  A strong fall in the greenback triggered rapid gains in commodities and options-related buying on Friday. Tonight US Congress will meet to attempt to devise a plan to avert the US fiscal cliff which will throw the US into a spiral of tax hikes and budgetary cuts that will lead the US economy deeper into a recession this January. Another short term ‘resolution’ will almost certainly be achieved which will allow the US to keep spending like a broke drunken sailor and which will again store up far greater fiscal and monetary problems. The scale of these deep rooted structural challenges is so great that they are likely to affect the US sooner rather than later. Global investment demand for gold remains robust with the amount in exchange-traded products backed by the metal rising 0.1% to 2,606.3 metric tons.

The Austrian central bank keeps most of its 280 metric tons of gold reserves in the United Kingdom, Vice Governor Wolfgang Duchatczek was quoted as saying in the finance committee of the country’s parliament today, according to Bloomberg. Answering lawmakers’ questions, Duchatczek said 80%, or 224.4 metric tons of the metal was stored in the U.K., 17% or 48.7 metric tons in Austria and 3% in Switzerland, according to a summary of a closed-door committee meeting provided by the parliament. The reserve has been unchanged since 2007, Duchatczek was quoted as saying. The central bank has earned 300 million euros ($385 million) over the last ten years by lending the gold, he said.

The World Gold Council issued a report “Global gold demand reflects challenging global economic climate: ETFs up 56% and India up 9% in Q3 2012”  which showed that global gold demand fell 11% in the three months to September from record levels seen during the same period last year, which was curbed by a sluggish Chinese economy and stronger Indian demand limited the drop. In Q3 2012, gold investment demand (total bar and coin demand plus ETFs and similar products) was 429.9 tonnes down 16% from Q3 2011. Although the year-on-year snapshot for investment demand suggests falling interest, this is not the case. Rather, it highlights the strong demand seen in Q3 2011. Interestingly, demand for ETFs rose 56% to 136t, compared to Q3 2011. Demand for gold-backed ETFs in Q3 grew significantly in the quarter partially due to institutions responding to the additional QE measures in the US and Europe. At 87 tonnes, Q3 2012 investment demand for gold surged from 78 tonnes in Q2, a rise of 12%. Examining this over the longer term, Q3 represents the first quarter-on-quarter increase in Indian investment demand since Q2 2011.

Chairman of the LBMA David Gornall told the conference, “When comparing China to the U.S., it would seem that in China, gold asset allocation can only go in one direction.  The country has only 2% of its reserves in the form of gold compared with the U.S. at 75%.” The People’s Bank of China hasn’t disclosed any changes to its gold holdings since 2009, when it said they had risen a whopping 76% to 1,054 metric tons. While the U.S., Germany, Italy and France keep more than 70% of reserves in gold, China’s share is less than 2%. “Prices have recently been supported by official sector buying,” Gornall said today, without listing any central bank. “Will the gap between the amount of gold held in reserve by the developing markets and that of the developed world close?” Brazil, South Korea and Russia have all added gold reserves this year data from the International Monetary Fund show. Nations bought 254.2 tons in the first six months and may increase to 500 tons this year, the World Gold Council said in August, exceeding the 456 tons added in 2011. China has the world’s largest foreign-exchange reserves, totaling $3.29 trillion in September, according to data by Bloomberg.

Gold is 3.35% higher and silver 4.53% higher this week in US dollars in the aftermath of Obama's re-election.  Gold in euros looks set to break out above €1,400/oz and is 4.1% higher and in sterling gold has risen 3.7% so far this week. Silver is 5.25% higher in euros and 4.8% higher in pounds. Gold and silver are set for higher weekly closes in all fiat currencies which may negate the recent bearish short term technical picture and set the precious metals up for the traditional yearend rally.  The data clearly shows that November is gold's strongest month and one of silver's strongest months. December, January and February are also strong months - prior to a period of weakness is often seen in March.