Last week we defined the golden sentiment rule [4]as "anything that isn't off the chart soon will be." This will happen in a "perfectly sustainable" fashion, where increasingly more paper gold is shorted to record levels even as actual physical holdings held by official Comex vaults continues to drop. For one particular reason why the price of paper gold may be at 3 year lows, we will provide some formerly classified perspective shortly in a post. But in the meantime, and while we await the weekly CFTC commitment of traders report (delayed until Monday due to the July 4 holiday), we are happy to report that the JPM disconnect between the epic delivery requests and its reported gold holdings (for which the "Commodity Exchange, Inc. disclaims all liability whatsoever with regard to its accuracy or completeness") reconnected modestly, and as per the latest Comex update [5], another 6.8k ounces of gold was pulled from JPM's 1 CMP world's biggest gold vault, dropping its total gold inventory to a fresh record low.
[6]
Perhaps even more notable is that on Friday, that "other" depository, Brink's, saw 24% of its entire registered gold holdings, or 133k ounces, quietly get withdrawn. This, together with the moves in JPM and HSBC inventory, meant that total Comex gold holdings dropped by 116K ounces to a new low not seen for the first time since 2006.
[7]
Finally, for that all important marginal source of paper gold supply or demand, ETFs,the two largest ones (GLD and IAU) have now retraced 50% of their "holdings" gain since the fall of Lehman.
[8]
Someone more inquisitive than us may wonder: just where is all this gold being "withdrawn" to...