BullionStar Blogs

Zimbabwe's Hyperinflation is Back

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• JP Koning
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Despite having dollarized back in 2008, Zimbabwe has once again entered hyperinflation territory. With it, the infamous dictator and the world's oldest leader at 93, Robert Mugabe, is finally losing grip of power. In this blog post, you can read about Zimbabwe's recent monetary experiment again hideously trying to issue a new version of the Zimbabwe dollar. Continue Reading

China Gold Import Jan-Sep 797t. Who’s Supplying?

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• Koos Jansen

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While the gold price is slowly crawling upward in the shadow of the current cryptocurrency boom, China continues to import huge tonnages of yellow metal. As usual, Chinese investors bought on the price dips in the past quarters, steadfastly accumulating for a rainy day. The Chinese appear to be price sensitive regarding gold, as was mentioned in the most recent World Gold Council Demand... Continue Reading

LME Gold & Silver Reference Prices: Will Anyone Notice?

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• Ronan Manly
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As the London Metal Exchange (LME) rolls out the publication of daily reference prices for gold and silver in London, the question must be asked, are they needed? The incumbent and dominant reference prices in the London precious metals market are the LBMA Gold Price and LBMA Silver Price. These LBMA prices are used to value everything from ETFs to OTC contracts, and, for better or... Continue Reading

October 2017 Gold Market Charts

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• Gold Market Charts
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BullionStar’s monthly gold charts series reviews developments in the world’s large physical gold markets including China, Russian and Switzerland.

Latest gold withdrawal data from the Shanghai Gold Exchange suggests that for the full year of 2017, Chinese wholesale gold demand will exceed 2000 tonnes. In September, the Russian central bank added a further 34 tonnes to its... Continue Reading

Degussa Singapore Closes Retail Store

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• BullionStar
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Exactly 2 years after opening a retail bullion shop in Singapore and expanding outside Europe, Degussa GoldHandel has announced that it is closing its Singapore shop on 31 October. Of possible relevance to the decision, the Degussa Singapore operation has been loss making since inception, with full year results to 31 December 2016 showing a new loss of SGD 2.8 million.

Although... Continue Reading

Neck and Neck: Russian & Chinese Official Gold Reserves

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• Ronan Manly
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For the last 10 years, the Bank of Russia has been aggressively adding to its official gold reserves, especially since 2014. Russian official gold reserves now stand at 1779 tonnes, the world’s 6th largest sovereign gold stockpile. Meanwhile, China, the world’s 5th largest sovereign gold holder with 1842 tonnes, has mysterious not ‘officially’ added any gold to its reserves... Continue Reading

The Gold-Backed-Oil-Yuan Futures Contract Myth

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• Koos Jansen

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On September 1, 2017, the Nikkei Asian Review published an article titled, “China sees new world order with oil benchmark backed by gold”, written by Damon Evans. Just below the headline in the introduction it states, “China is expected shortly to launch a crude oil futures contract priced in yuan and convertible into gold in what analysts say could be a game-changer for the... Continue Reading

BullionStar Rebuilds Community Center in Indonesia

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• BullionStar
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Across the border of Singapore, a ferry-ride away, a fire broke out on Saturday, 8 July 2017 in a slum in Muka Kuning, Batam, Indonesia. The fire destroyed 10 huts tragically affecting the lives of the families living there who already struggle daily to make ends meet. We decided to take a small step towards making a difference in this community and funded the restoration of the... Continue Reading

Essentials of China's Gold Market

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• BullionStar
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A series of 8 articles about the Chinese Gold Market have now been added to Gold University section of BullionStar’s website. These articles are collected titled “Chinese Gold Market Essentials”. The articles are mostly structured around the supply – demand equation of the Chinese gold market which has the Shanghai Gold Exchange at its core, as the market’s allocation... Continue Reading

September 2017 Gold Market Charts

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• Gold Market Charts
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This month’s Gold Market Chart commentary as always, looks at trends and developments in the world’s largest physical gold markets including the Swiss and London gold markets, Chinese gold demand and the growth in Russian official gold reserves.

In China, cumulative gold withdrawals from the Shanghai Gold Exchange for the year to end of August suggest that Chinese... Continue Reading

LBMA Silver Benchmark – Changes, But No Wider Participation

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• Ronan Manly
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On 2 October, ICE Benchmark Administration will take over the running of the daily LBMA Silver Price auction. This follows the mysterious decision in March of this year when CME and Thomson Reuters announced that they would be stepping down from administering and calculating this widely used silver price benchmark.

While the tender process of appointing a silver auction... Continue Reading

New Release Now Available: 2018 Australian Lunar Series

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• BullionStar
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Australian Lunar Series 2018 now available for ordering! Continue Reading

Torgny Persson: Will Gold Hit $65,000 in 5 Years?

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• BullionStar
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Is it realistic that the price of gold could reach USD 65,000/oz in 5 years? In this speech, BullionStar's CEO, Mr Torgny Persson, shares his views on the gold price as well discusses the following topics:

1) Money System of Today - How does our monetary system work? Or doesn't work? Do fiat currencies like the US Dollar have any real intrinsic value?

2) Gold... Continue Reading

Winners of BullionStar's Silver Britannia Competition

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• BullionStar
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In the month of August 2017, we launched a competition in collaboration with The Royal Mint. The competition invited customers of The Royal Mint and BullionStar to promote the Royal Mint Brand in Singapore through any medium! We received numerous top quality submissions and after much deliberation, we present to you the two winners of the competition, Ms. … Continue Reading

BullionStar Media & Original Content

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• BullionStar
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BullionStar's website features a wide variety of original analysis and content on precious metals markets globally and which provides readers and viewers with unique and up-to-date insights that are not available elsewhere.

A case in point is the BullionStar Perspectives video series which gives viewers free access to leading independent analysis of precious metals markets. In... Continue Reading

BullionStar Financials FY 2017 – Year in Review

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• BullionStar
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BullionStar is transparently releasing sales data and information about the company's overall financial performance for each financial year. This blog post presents the financials as they stood at the end of the financial year 2017. BullionStar increased its sales revenue to SGD 186,200,000 for FY 2017, up 38.7% from SGD 134,200,000 for FY 2016. BullionStar handled 15,213 buy orders... Continue Reading

August 2017 Gold Market Charts

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• Gold Market Charts
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The August edition of BullionStar’s monthly gold chart analysis has now been published to the BullionStar website.

Gold withdrawals from the Shanghai Gold Exchange totalled 144.7 tonnes in July. So far this year, 1129 tonnes of gold have been withdrawn from the SGE vaults.During July, the Russian central bank purchased a further 12 tonnes of gold for its official reserves,... Continue Reading

Mnuchin’s Fort Knox Visit Proves Nothing About U.S. Gold

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• Ronan Manly
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On Monday August 21, Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, accompanied by the Senate’s Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin, and Kentucky’s Rep Brett Guthrie took a hastily organized and rare visit to the US Mint’s gold depository in Fort Knox, Kentucky. This trip into the vault does not appear to have included any media representatives.

According to... Continue Reading

BullionStar Quoted in WSJ Article on New York Fed Gold

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• Ronan Manly
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On 10 August, the Wall Street Journal published an article on its front-page about the New York Federal Reserve’s gold vault, and the central bank gold said to be stored there. The article featured a quote from Ronan Manly about this Fed stored gold. A short blog post has now been added to the the BullionStar website featuring this coverage by the Wall Street Journal, with some... Continue Reading

BullionStar Presents on Real Vision TV

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• Ronan Manly
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During June, Real Vision TV filmed a presentation by BullionStar addressing some topical areas of the gold market. This presentation was originally produced exclusively for the subscription-based Real Vision audience and covers the fractional-reserve gold trading in the London Gold Market, some concerns and risks of gold-backed ETFs, and the benefits and attractions of real physical... Continue Reading

Can Gold Surge to $65,000 in 5 Years?

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• BullionStar
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Although the international price of gold is set by paper gold markets, these markets cannot price physical gold accurately because they don’t trade physical gold. Instead they trade infinitely scalable fractional claims on physical gold. Conversely, real physical gold is not a claim on gold. It is gold. Real physical gold is real money, and is the ultimate form of saving and store of... Continue Reading

LBMA Gold Vault Data: How Low is the London Gold Float?

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• Ronan Manly
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The LBMA has just released its first update on the quantities of physical gold and physical silver stored in the LBMA vaulting network in London. This network comprises precious metals vaults of 7 commercial operators and also the Bank of England gold vaults. As of the end of March, there are said to be about a combined 7,450 tonnes of gold and 32,000 tonnes of silver across these... Continue Reading

The West Lost Over 1000 Tonnes of Gold in 2015

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• Ronan Manly
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One of the most important trends in the physical gold world is the ongoing depletion of Western gold inventories to supply the relentless demand for high purity small bar denominations (such as kilogram gold bars). Most of this demand is coming from Asian markets such as China and India. Most of this supply is coming from the London gold market.

Based on LBMA gold refinery... Continue Reading

Estimated Chinese Gold Reserves Surpass 20,000t

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• Koos Jansen

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My best estimate as of June 2017 with respect to total above ground gold reserves within the Chinese domestic market is 20,193 tonnes. The majority of these reserves are held by the citizenry, an estimated 16,193 tonnes; the residual 4,000 tonnes, which is a speculative yet conservative estimate, is held by the Chinese central bank the People’s Bank of China. Continue Reading

July 2017 Gold Market Charts

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• Gold Market Charts
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The July edition of BullionStar’s monthly gold chart analysis has now been published to the BullionStar website.

Physical gold demand in all of the world’s largest physical gold markets remains strong, from robust Indian gold imports to consistently strong gold withdrawals from the Shanghai Gold Exchange. The Russian central bank continues to patiently accumulate further... Continue Reading

Did the Dutch Central Bank Lie About Its Gold Bar List?

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• Koos Jansen

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The Dutch central bank states that releasing a bar list of the Dutch gold “would cost hundreds of thousands of euros”. In this post we’ll expose this is virtually impossible. Continue Reading

PBOC Gold Purchases: Separating Facts from Speculation

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• Koos Jansen

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This post is part of the Chinese Gold Market essentials series. Click here to go to an overview of all Chinese Gold Market Essentials for a comprehensive understanding of the largest physical gold market globally. This post was updated late 2017. In this post we will analyze everything there is to learn about PBOC gold purchases. Grasping the exact size of … Continue Reading

Is the COMEX Rigged?

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• Ronan Manly
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Many people will by now have heard of COMEX gold futures price 'flash crashes' during which the gold price collapses in free fall fashion over a few second interval. Whether these flash crashes are the result of trading errors, futures market illiquidity, computerized trading patterns or deliberately engineered moves is debateable.

But beyond the actual flash crash incidents on... Continue Reading

CME Stays Silent on Cause of COMEX Silver Price Glitch

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• Ronan Manly
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Following an incident which caused a large rapid drop in COMEX gold futures prices last week, this week was the turn of COMEX silver where a short-lived and rapid ‘flash crash’ caused the price of COMEX silver futures prices to fall by more than 10% within 1 minute only to rebound strongly in the subsequent minute. While the CME Group which operates the COMEX has not provided an... Continue Reading

Bullion Banks Line Up to Support LME’s Gold Futures

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• Ronan Manly
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The London Metal Exchange (LME) is about to launch a range of new gold and silver futures in the London market (LMEprecious). Crucially though, these gold futures do not deliver physical gold or silver. Instead they transfer around unallocated gold and unallocated silver, units of which are fractionally-backed in the London precious metals markets.

This LME development is also... Continue Reading

How Many Silver Bars Are in the LBMA's London Vaults?

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• Ronan Manly
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BullionStar has previously analyzed how many gold bars are in the LBMA London gold vaults. Now we turn our attention to how many real physical silver bars are in those same LBMA London vaults. The subject is topical because the LBMA is about to start reporting the total quantity of both gold and silver stored in its network of vaults in London.

But whereas with gold, the vast... Continue Reading

June 2017 Gold Market Charts

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• Gold Market Charts
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The June edition of BullionStar’s monthly gold chart analysis has now been published to the BullionStar website. The featured charts have been created by the Gold Charts R US market chart website.

This monthly series analyses recent developments in the world’s largest physical gold markets such as India, China, Russia and Switzerland. During May, Russia added a sizeable 22... Continue Reading

Are the World’s Billionaire Investors Actually Buying Gold?

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• Ronan Manly
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The mainstream financial media regularly records the interest in gold from some of the world’s most famous hedge fund managers. But are these legendary investors, all of whom are billionaires, actually buying real physical gold, or are they using paper proxies such as gold futures, gold-backed ETFs, or even gold mining stocks? This new article from BullionStar aims to find out, and... Continue Reading

Our Extensive Range of Royal Mint Gold & Silver Coins

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• BullionStar
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BullionStar carries an extensive range of investment grade gold bullion coins and silver bullion coins minted by Britain’s famous Royal Mint. The Royal Mint is fully owned by Her Majesty’s Treasury and has the distinction of being the world’s oldest mint. BullionStar’s range of Royal Mint bullion coins includes gold and silver Britannia coins, gold … Continue Reading

May 2017 Gold Market Charts

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• Gold Market Charts
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The May edition of BullionStar’s monthly gold chart analysis has now been added to the BullionStar website. This monthly series features the latest developments in the world’s physical gold markets and this month includes discussion of Indian gold imports, adjustments to Shanghai Gold Exchange gold withdrawal figures, the relatively low addition of gold reserves by the Russian... Continue Reading

Buy and Sell Gold and Silver With Bitcoin

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• BullionStar
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Following Bitcoin's recent strong price appreciation, Bitcoin holders may be thinking of taking profits or diversifying some of their Bitcoin position into physical precious metals. It is therefore interesting to know that BullionStar's online transactional website fully supports Bitcoin and has done so since May 2014.

Using BullionStar's website, customers can buy gold and... Continue Reading

New Gold Pool at the BIS Basel: Part 2

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• Ronan Manly
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Following last week’s publication of “New Gold Pool at the BIS Basle, Switzerland, Part 1”, there now follows Part 2 of this two-part series. Part 2 continues to examine how in the early 1980s, the world's most powerful central bankers who met at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Switzerland called for the launch of a central bank Gold Pool cartel so as to manipulate... Continue Reading

An Update on SGE Vault Withdrawals & Price Premiums

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• Ronan Manly
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With four months of gold withdrawal data now released by the Shanghai Gold Exchange (SGE) covering January to April, the year 2017 is shaping up to be one of very high gold demand in the Chinese market. SGE gold withdrawal figures are a suitable proxy to measure wholesale Chinese gold demand because nearly all gold entering the market is required to flow through the Exchange. SGE gold... Continue Reading

New Gold Pool at the BIS Basel, Switzerland: Part 1

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• Ronan Manly
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Many people are familiar with the London Gold Pool which operated between 1961 and 1968 to control the price of gold in the London gold market. But very few people are aware that more than 11 years later, the same set of Western central banks, at central bank governor level, met in secrecy at the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) over an extended period during 1979 and 1980 and... Continue Reading

SGE Trading Surged 43% in 2016 Led by OTC & Deferred Trading

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• Ronan Manly
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Trading volumes on the Shanghai Gold Exchange (SGE), the world's largest physical gold trading venue, have nearly tripled over the last 3 years. Full year volumes for 2016 came in at over 24,300 tonnes, a 43% rise on 2015's 17,000 tonnes. The equivalent figure for 2014 was 9243 tonnes. Much of the growth in volumes is coming from OTC trading of the 1 kilogram 9999 fine gold contract,... Continue Reading

LBMA Confirms Upcoming Publication of London Gold Holdings

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• Ronan Manly
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The London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) has now confirmed that it will begin publishing gold and silver holdings data for the London based commercial precious vaults sometime during the summer of 2017. Details on this new data are still sketchy as the press release issued by the LBMA has not confirmed in what format the data will be issued, what historical time periods if any will... Continue Reading

April 2017 Gold Market Charts

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• Gold Market Charts
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The latest edition of BullionStar’s monthly gold chart analysis has now been published. This month’s article features charts capturing current developments in the world’s physical gold markets including the latest Swiss gold import and export numbers, as well as Russian gold reserve accumulation, Shanghai Gold Exchange withdrawals, COMEX gold inventories, and the continued gold... Continue Reading

Bank of England Releases New Data On its Gold Vault Holdings

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• Ronan Manly
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The Bank of England has just published new data on its website detailing month-end gold custody holdings for gold held within its vaults. This data covers every month for the last 6 years i.e. from January 2012 to December 2016. Going forward, the Bank of England will publish updates to this data with a 3 month lag. The new gold vault data will be very useful for seeing the ebbs and... Continue Reading

Sweden’s Gold Reserves: 10,000 Gold Bars Shrouded in Secrecy

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• Ronan Manly
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In October 2013, the Swedish central bank, the Riksbank, for the first time revealed the storage locations of its sizeable gold bar reserves. Sweden claims to hold 125.7 tonnes of gold scattered across central bank gold vaults in New York, London, Canada, Switzerland and also in Sweden. At the time, the Riksbank also claimed it was going to start to physically audit this gold. Fast... Continue Reading

Death Spiral for the LBMA Gold & Silver Auctions?

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• Ronan Manly
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This week the LBMA Silver Price and LBMA Gold Price daily auctions were both hit by unusual price movements over two consecutive days, on 10 April and 11 April. In both cases, the prices being quoted in the auctions deviated noticeably from their respective spot prices. There is little information on what exactly happened in the silver auction since none of CME (calculation agent),... Continue Reading

Germany's Heraeus Acquires Swiss Gold Refiner Argor-Heraeus

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• Ronan Manly
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Following the July 2015 acquisition of Swiss gold and silver Valcambi by Indian group Rajesh Exports, and the July 2016 acquisition of Swiss precious metals refiner Metalor Technologies by Japanese Tanaka Precious Metals, it has now been announced that German industrial group Heraeus, a leading precious refiner, has moved to fully acquire the giant Argor-Heraeus gold and silver refinery... Continue Reading

What Sets the Gold Price – the Paper or Physical Market?

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• BullionStar
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Everyone involved in the global gold market is aware of the gold price, the price that is constantly quoted in the financial media. But where does this gold price come from, i.e. where is it discovered? Is the gold price formed through the massive trading volumes of the paper gold markets such as the COMEX gold futures markets and London OTC unallocated gold market, or is the gold price... Continue Reading

March 2017 Gold Market Charts

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• Gold Market Charts
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BullionStar’s monthly gold chart wrap-up highlights major themes in the world’s largest gold markets using up-to-date charts from the extensive GoldChartsRUSs website. This month’s selection includes updates on Russian central bank gold reserve accumulation, Swiss gold import and export destinations, patterns in gold-backed ETF inflows and outflows, and Chinese gold demand through... Continue Reading

BullionStar Financials FY 2016 – Year in Review

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• BullionStar
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BullionStar has adopted a transparent approach in releasing BullionStar financials i.e. information about the company's overall performance and sales data for each financial year. This blog post presents the financials as they stood at the end of the financial year 2016. FY 2016 was a very strong year for BullionStar with sales revenues totaling SGD 134,200,000, a 111.7% increase from... Continue Reading

Mexico’s Earmarked Gold Bars in Bank of England Vaults

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• Ronan Manly
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In response to a Freedom of Information Request by Mexican financial writer Guillermo Barba, Mexico’s central bank Banixco, has just a released a quite comprehensive list of 7265 gold bars that it holds in the Bank of England’s gold vaults. This is unusual in that very few central banks ever allow publication of such a list. While the Banixco list does not include real serial... Continue Reading