Mark Cutifani: Major Buyers Are Finding It’s Hard To Get Physical Gold

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What I thought was the most fascinating of Mark’s comments during the interview, was his observations of major gold buyers emerging from the Middle East & Asia. “People are coming directly to us,” for large gold purchases he said. “People who want tonnes of physical gold, people with serious financial muscle…because they’re finding it’s very difficult to secure the volume of gold they want…That’s something we’ve noticed over the last 18 months, and it’s been increasing in the last 6 months. I think people are finding its hard to get physical gold.”
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KWN's 'London Trader' said:

The Chinese have continued to take delivery of both physical gold and silver directly from the ETF’s GLD and SLV. They are also going directly to producers. Entities are bypassing the COMEX altogether and going straight to gold mining companies. Every single month producers have a certain amount of gold and silver they sell. Normally they sell it to the bullion banks and the bullion banks, of course, leverage this gold and sell up to 100 times that in paper markets to control prices.

They (bullion banks) hold that little bit of physical gold and claim they are backed up on their position to the CFTC. I have all my large buyers now going to producers and saying to them, ‘Look, don’t sell it to the bullion banks, we’ll buy it from you.’ So we are buying directly from the producers and this includes some sovereign entities which are doing the same thing.

We’re struggling to get the physical out of these guys (producers) because they have so many people banging on their door, saying, ‘Sell it to us direct.’ What these buyers are doing is essentially taking gold out of the system, which means the bullion banks can’t leverage that gold anymore.

So this is a huge, dynamic shift that wasn’t there before. Now we are working on one other thing. We’re beginning to offer them forward contracts. If you are a sovereign entity, what you are saying to these producers, especially on new projects, is, ‘Why don’t you sell the gold to me in 12 months? Here’s the cash, just provide it to me 12 months from now.’

These buyers are now cutting off future gold supply from the bullion banks....

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