Global demand for gold in 2019 will rise to the highest in four years as higher consumption by jewelers offsets a fall in purchases by central banks, an industry report said on Monday.

Bank of Italy’s Governor Ignazio Visco said on Monday the country’s reserves of gold belonged to the central bank and could not be used to fund government spending.

Romania may be set to join a wave of countries moving their gold home from vaults abroad after the nation’s de facto leader started a push to relocate 61 tons of the reserves, worth about $2.4 billion, from the U.K.

At least 8 tons of gold were removed from the Venezuelan central bank’s vaults last week, an opposition legislator and three government sources told Reuters, in the latest sign of President Nicolas Maduro’s desperation to raise hard currency amid tightening sanctions.

Venezuela will sell 15 tonnes of gold from central bank vaults to the United Arab Emirates in coming days in return for euros in cash. In total, the plan is to sell 29 tonnes of gold held in Caracas by February.

Just hours after The Bank of England refused to hand over $1.2 billion of Venezuela's gold from its custody vaults to President Maduro, The Guardian reports that a UK foreign office minister is now urging the same Bank of England to transfer the bullion to the self-proclaimed interim leader Juan Guaidó.

Venezuela’s gold holdings in the Bank of England have jumped after it closed out a gold swap deal with Deutsche Bank, according to two sources, as Britain remains reluctant to release gold held for the troubled OPEC nation.

Russia has overtaken China to become the world’s fifth largest official sector holder of gold as Western sanctions drove buying by its central bank to record highs in 2018, its data showed on Friday.

The top reasons why you should buy physical gold and silver in 2019.

The Bank of France has partnered with U.S. banking group JPMorgan to expand its range of gold bullion services for central banks.

John Edmonds, 36, pleaded guilty to one count of commodities fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, price manipulation and spoofing.

Gold demand was 964.3t in Q3, just 6.2t higher y-o-y. Robust central bank buying and a 13% rise in consumer demand offset large ETF outflows.

Last month we saw imports of gold into Switzerland and then exports to Asia and India. Last month, over 70% of the gold import figures (into Switzerland) came from London and the United States.

Hungary’s central bank increased its gold reserves 10-fold, citing the need to improve its holdings’ safety, joining regional peers with relatively high ownership in the European Union’s east.

In recent weeks we have been wary that, despite highly favorable COTs and Hedgers charts and rotten sentiment indicators etc, a general asset liquidation might drag the PM sector even further down, but Thursday’s extraordinarily positive action by the sector serves to allay those fears.

The world is less well equipped to manage a major financial crisis today than it was a decade ago, according to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a former chief of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has bought gold for the first time in nearly a decade, signalling that the metal could be in demand as a store of value when returns and capital values of fixed-income bonds are declining in a rising rate environment.

How will Iran, Russia, and Turkey react to the plethora of financial sanctions being placed on them by the United States? Well, they will do what anyone being beaten with a stick would do: they will try to escape.

President Nicolas Maduro said Venezuela will begin to sell certificates backed by gold ingots as a savings mechanism starting next month.

We are now seeing an overwhelming body of evidence coming together to suggest that gold and silver have hit bottom, and that even if they haven't, the bottom is very close and downside risk is very limited.