Western Central Banks Have No More Gold…Only Gold Receivables! - Eric Sprott

By The Doc: Bloomberg has released a MUST WATCH interview with our good friend Eric Sprott of Sprott Asset Management discussing his thoughts on gold.  While unable to specifically discuss silver due to the current PSLV follow-on, Sprott simply destroyed the MSM pundits’ anti-gold arguments, stating that gold has beat the Dickens out of every other asset class over the last 12 years, and questioned whether the Western Central Banks have any physical gold left in the vaults, as the gold listed on their balance sheets includes gold receivables, which has been leased out and is gone for good.
The legendary Eric Sprott’s full MUST WATCH interview below:
Bloomberg kicked the interview off by asking Sprott whether he is as much a fan of precious metals today as he once was, ”given the fact that they’ve treated you so poorly over the past 18 months?”  Sprott replied:

A little history is probably important here.  Gold has gone from $250 to over $1700.  It’s beat the Dickens out of every other asset class over the last 12 years…To specifically answer your question, am I more optimistic today than I might otherwise be?  Absolutely.   I wrote an article recently questioning whether the Western Central Banks had any gold left.  We simply did a physical analysis of the people that are coming into the gold market and the changes that have happened since 2000, (and the supply of gold has not changed since 2000 on an annual basis, it’s still 4,000 tons).   When you look at the fact that the central banks used to sell 400 tons annually, now they buy 500 tons.  The ETF didn’t even exist in 2000, now they buy 300 tons a year.

The Bloomberg host then interrupted Sprott to claim that this sounds like a conspiracy theory and asked for another reason to buy gold.  Sprott responded:

I could probably give you 20 reasons.  How about money printing?  QE1, QE2, QE3, LTRO, OMT’s, people are essentially debasing their currencies.  They’re not holding them in the esteem that they should, and it’s reflected in the fact that the price of gold’s gone up.  One of the issues we have with gold is the fact that it hasn’t performed well in the last 18 months…But People are flocking to gold.  When I look at the US Mint statistics for gold sales.  When I look at what the Chinese are doing in terms of imports of gold from Hong Kong into the mainland, they’re up 500 tons in the last 12 months in a 4,000 ton market!!  Imagine if the Chinese bought an extra 12% of the oil or wheat market this year!  Would they get it?  And who’s supplying the 500 tons?  We already had a market that was in balance!
Gold production is flat, and one might even argue that the gold miners may have trouble increasing production this year.  You’ve seen the disappointments of Barrick and Newmont, and many others are having issues.

The Bloomberg host then asked Sprott why the gold price hasn’t responded to those supply and demand factors.  Sprott responded:

Well, there’s two markets for gold.  There’s the paper market, the COMEX futures.  You can have the annual gold production trade in two days on the paper market.  I focus on the physical market.  I want to see what people are doing with their money physically.  Are they continuing to buy more and more gold, year after year?  Every indication we have is that they continue to buy INCREASING AMOUNTS OF GOLD.  Sooner or later, (and ask Eric asked, how do the central banks sell gold without telling anybody?), they have a very simple way: Central banks have one line on their balance sheets for gold and gold receivables!  If they lease gold to a bullion dealer, that’s a receivable.  That gold has obviously been sold into the market, but we can’t tell what’s real gold and what’s receivable (on the central bank balance sheets).

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