Financial crisis

Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini said on Monday that the idea of plugging budget holes by using the country’s gold reserves, which are held by the Bank of Italy, could be a good idea.

The media outlets didn’t go with this news, probably fearing some fake news or another conspiracy theory, while examining the sources in my articles would have reassured them immediately. But did they bother?

Gold is a highly liquid yet scarce asset, and it is no one’s liability. It is bought as a luxury good as much as an investment. As such, gold can play four fundamental roles in a portfolio: a source of long-term returns, a diversifier that can mitigate losses in times of market stress, a liquid asset with no credit risk that has outperformed fiat currencies, and a means to enhance overall portfolio performance.

The lack of audits and the massive trading of paper gold, does point to the fact that there is something more sinister going on in the gold market. This is all likely to be revealed when the real pressure on the dollar starts and gold rises fast. At that time paper holders of gold will ask for delivery and China and Russia will call the US bluff.

A surge in gold purchases by central banks to the highest since 1967 helped push global demand for the metal up 4 percent last year, the World Gold Council (WGC) said on Thursday.

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.

Many people use goldbug scathingly as a pejorative as they have never bothered to understand the significance of gold. So why have I, and a few others, been advocating the ownership of gold for the last 17 years without being goldbugs?

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.

Anyone who wants to protect their wealth should not be invested in any of the bubble asset markets. But to also avoid counterparty risk is a lot harder.

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.