Late last year (September 2015) I posted and linked to Ronan Manly's Blog about The LBMA, Thomson/Reuters GFMS, and The 2000 Tonnes of Gold that Just Appeared in 2013.
(Link: https://www.tfmetalsreport.com/blog/7128/lbma-thompsonreuters-and-2000-t... September 8, 2015 )
Now if you, Dear Reader, or I myself ,were to suddenly gain (or lose!) several thousand tonnes of monetary metal - raw material for a Country's National Asset Holdings and it's Central Bank Currency Reserves- we would probably notice this fact pretty fast. And upon completing our tax returns, annual accounts, or just doing monthly management accounts, we would be highly likely to have the quantity and value highlighted clearly and without any doubt, vagueness, or lack of clarity in any way.
But the great and large and trusted institutions that actually do deal with gold, I mean really big gold exchanges, the purveyors of gold markets supply and demand data. Well ... how should I put this? They seem to have certain "tweaks" that come and go in their printed brochures, press releases and so on. And it's amazing how often central bank secretive transactions are never too distant from the errata, vagueness, or whatever adjective you personally prefer to use in describing the lack of precision in such large monetary numbers.
Now when I say the word "tweak" you might be forgiven in assuming some small adjustment, errata, correction upon arrival of more exact statistics and such like.
But this time it's 600 tonnes approximately.
That's 600 tonnes of gold.
Are you sitting up paying attention? That's quite a "tweak", isn't it? A sizeable tweak. A whopper. If we talk US dollar sized tweaks, it's 24 billion and 9 million of them!
This latest episode comes once again from Ronan Manly's latest Blog article at Bullionstar.dot com:
Apples and Oranges: An update on LBMA Refinery Statistics and GFMS
It's well worth a read. Thanks for the research Ronan!
I leave you to follow the links and read Ronan's full article. His final paragraph goes to the heart of the matter. Our respect and tolerance, and whether these are actually warranted in certain high profile institutions:
".... Overall, this series of communications from the LBMA leaves a lot to be desired, and undermines trust in LBMA issued data. It will be interesting to see whether the LBMA will surreptitiously alter its press release and brochure, or issue a correction and clarification, or leave the errors as is in the respective documents. "
That's it for now!
Best of luck to you.
Argentus Maximus
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The author posts daily commentary on the gold and silver markets in the TFMR forum: The Setup For The Big Trade. More information about the author & his work can be found here: RhythmNPrice. The author advises that he trades and holds market positions in accordance with his own opinions.