Sunday 18 November 2018

Gold Remonetisation - Basel III - Gold as Tier 1 Asset at 100% Valuation

I have seen little public commentary on the Basel III changes, but this seems to set the stage for serious flows into Physical Gold by financial institutions.

....under Basel III, monetary gold now qualifies as a Tier 1 asset, and is 100% valued for the purposes of banking viability. Another point to consider is that SIFIs are now required to quadruple their reserves when compared to the previous minimum requirements before the banking crisis. Essentially, monetary gold is now considered risk free. This significant development remains relatively unknown – for now......The Basel Committee on Banking Standards (BCBS) scrapped the old Basel II framework and put in place a plan that will be fully realized by all SIFIs by 2019.......February 2018 marked a major turning point for gold – monetary gold to be more specific – when the Swiss National Pension Fund switched out of synthetic gold derivatives into physical gold. Monetary gold is defined, in the new Basel III banking capital rules, as “physical gold held in their own vaults or in trust.” The Swiss decision complied with the new banking standards regarding capital adequacy as it relates to solvency and viability. All Systemically Important Financial Institutions (SIFI) must comply with the new rules for Net Stable Funding Ratio (NSF) and Liquidity by January 2019. Lessons learned from the last liquidity crisis, when Lehman Brothers nearly caused a global financial meltdown, forced a rethink in how assets held on an institution’s balance sheet are to be valued. Counter-party risk became extremely important again. In short, when trust between SIFIs fails, liquidity dries up as lending ceases due to solvency fears. The need for liquidity was a key change in the creation of the new standards, and it shone a spotlight on an asset that had largely been ignored for this purpose – physical gold.
Since the financial crisis government bonds have served to recapitalise the banks. As QE reduced interest rates the value of bonds increased.

If we have reached a point where interest rates increase, through distrust of government debt and bonds, this banking capital value will decrease.

Could banking flows into gold drive increased prices and  become an essential counter-weight to decreasing bond values, and capital, for the banks?

http://bmg-group.com/gold-re-monetization-is-closer-than-many-realize/

Saturday 19 May 2018

US Targets Domestic Supply Boost for 35 Key Minerals - Executive Order 13817

Story here 
The Trump administration wants to identify new domestic sources of critical minerals; increase domestic exploration, mining and recycling; give miners and producers electronic access to better mapping and geological data; and streamline leasing and permitting for new mines

Details HERE

Covering
list of 35 critical minerals. The final list includes: Aluminum (bauxite), antimony, arsenic, barite, beryllium, bismuth, cesium, chromium, cobalt, fluorspar, gallium, germanium, graphite (natural), hafnium, helium, indium, lithium, magnesium, manganese, niobium, platinum group metals, potash, the rare earth elements group, rhenium, rubidium, scandium, strontium, tantalum, tellurium, tin, titanium, tungsten, uranium, vanadium, and zirconium

Wednesday 14 March 2018

Monday 12 March 2018

Gold Based Crypto

Long list emerging HERE

Including the Sprott Backed Tradewind

"Gold-focused money manager Sprott owns approximately 20 percent of TradeWind and plans to use the platform as a dealer, but said it’s too soon to say whether it will migrate its physical gold trust onto the platform. Chief Executive Officer Peter Grosskopf called the digitization of gold trading “the most important thing to happen to the gold market in the last several decades.”
“Gold has always been criticized as being an inefficient product, a lazy product, a product that’s hard to transact with,” Grosskopf said in a phone interview. “It’s almost as though the blockchain were invented for gold. The marriage of the two, I think it’s going to be incredibly powerful.”
Grosskopf said he sees a day where gold is used as a form of digital cash, supplanting cryptocurrencies and opening up a “completely new user base.”
“It’s a market that’s many hundred times as large as cryptocurrency markets and once it’s fast and it’s secure, why would anyone use crypto?” Grosskopf said. “Every year since the 1970s gold has lost market share to financial assets and I think this gives it a chance to come back against those financial assets.”

Wednesday 28 February 2018

Wednesday 21 February 2018

Peter Brandt on Gold

Article
"My bias is that Gold will rip through resistance to commence a new bull trend"

Fred Hickey on the Opportunity in Gold Miners

"So, we have this huge disconnect between the price of gold and the margins of the miners -- which are doing very well because they had to keep their costs low -- and the price of the stocks. Now, ultimately, that will get corrected. We saw the huge run in 2015, where gold went up 30% in the beginning of 2016 and the miners went up 180%. And we saw that in 2000, when gold went up quite a bit, and the miners went up 1600%. That’s 17 times the average. We saw that in the 1970s coming out of the bear market there. We saw that on the big net buyers went up at least 10 times, and some of them went up as much as 30 times. So, this happens regularly when the miners get depressed. They get out of whack with the price of gold and margins, and then they slingshot higher. And that’s what I think we’re about to see.
We’re right there. I think there’s going to be enormous amounts of money entering this sector once again, just as we saw in early 2000s, just like we did coming out of 2015, the bottom, just as we did coming out of the 1970s mid-cycle correction. So, I’m pretty excited about it."


Article / Podcast

Tuesday 2 January 2018

Peter Brandt on Gold 2018

"I believe there is a good chance that the precious metals will be an outstanding asset class in 2018 – Gold could outperform Bitcoin in the year ahead."

https://www.peterlbrandt.com/2018-gold-outlook/