Hedge funds’ bullish bets on gold jump to four-year high
Hedge funds and other large speculators boosted their net-long position in gold.
China shocked the gold market in July last year by revealing its official reserves for the first time since 2009. It put to an end to years of speculation and rumours of Beijing quietly buying massive amounts of bullion.
The People’s Bank of China had been buying gold to the tune of 100 tonnes a year since 2009 (way below some estimates/hopes) and it appears the central bank’s plan is to add to its reserves at roughly the same clip in future.
On Thursday PBOC – which is battling credibility issues concerning what some are calling a stealth devaluation of the renminbi – updated the figures again saying reserves of the metal grew by 19 tonnes during the month of December for a total of 1,767 tonnes or 56.7 million troy ounces. During the second half of 2015 the bank added more than 100 tonnes.
China sits above Russia – another active buyer of gold – in the list of countries with the largest stash of the yellow metal, placing it in the fifth position, after the US, Germany, the International Monetary Fund, Italy and France, according to the World Gold Council.
In terms of gold as a percentage of total forex reserves, gold constitutes only 1.8% of China $3.3 trillion reserves. That compares to 70% in the US and Germany.
It was revealed on Thursday that in December China’s reserves dropped by nearly $108 billion, the biggest decline on record bringing total holdings to the lowest in three years.
Gold has benefitted from safe haven buying and turmoil on global equity and currency markets sparked by fears about the economic outlook for China. Gold was last trading at $1,108.90 an ounce in New York, up 1.6% on the day.
Priced in renminbi, the price of gold is up 6% so far in 2016, while the Shanghai Composite Index of stocks is down 12% since the start of the year although losses would’ve been much greater if not for intervention by authorities.
2 Comments
methods3110
I don’t know why we believe anything they say. The public receives nothing but false reporting.It is as though the authorities regard them as having no rights at all to the truth, just there to be cheated and milked for the continued perpetration of the elites in power.
RChange
I think this guy will not buy that 1.8% story: “When China set up the Shanghai Gold Exchange in 2002 and encouraged its private sector to accumulate gold, the state had obviously acquired enough bullion for its own strategic purposes. We cannot know how much the state has actually accumulated, or indeed to what extent the gold she has mined has been taken into state ownership since, but the amount is likely to be very substantial. We do know that gross deliveries into public hands since 2002, satisfied mainly by imports from western vaults, exceed 11,000 tonnes to date. It is therefore quite possible that China and its citizens now have more gold than all the other central banks put together, given that some official gold is currently leased by western central banks and some has been secretly sold to suppress the price.” http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-09/gold-2016-economic-power-shifting