India has banned the export of gold products with purity above 22 carats with immediate effect, a move that the industry sees as a way of curbing irregularities in the trade.

The Directorate General of Foreign Trade issued a notice limiting shipments of jewelry, coins and medallions to 22 carats or below, without giving a reason.

Our two stars, fortuitously set into collision course by two separate supernovae, approached each other and then, captured by each others’ gravity, entered a death spiral. They collided in an unimaginable explosion, unleashing a power density far greater than that of a mere supernova and trillions of times greater than if a mere mountain-sized asteroid had hit the earth. The collision was so intense that it created a black hole and a burst of extremely high energy light called gamma rays. Escaping the black hole along with the gamma rays was a spray of new, heavier metals, including gold. This gold-rich cloud in part expanded and in part coalesced, participating in the subsequent formation of new solar systems, including our own. Due to this collision of rare intensity, our unusual solar system was seeded with astronomically rare heavy metals such as gold along with the more common supernova products such as copper and silver

The Chinese gold market is the world’s largest physical gold market. It is also one of the world’s most protected gold markets given that the importation of gold into China is still strictly controlled by the Chinese authorities, and the exportation of gold out of China is generally prohibited.

Hence, the market is often referred to as the Chinese ‘domestic’ gold market since gold flows and gold trading in the market are predominantly domestic in nature. Despite these trade restrictions, China still manages to be the largest importer of gold in the world. Furthermore, the Chinese gold mining sector is also the largest producer of gold in the world.

COTs this week

Eighty feet below the streets of lower Manhattan, a Federal Reserve vault protected by armed guards contains about 6,200 tons of gold.

Or doesn't.

CME raises gold & silver margins by approx 8%

So just as this is an extraordinarily dangerous moment in the tech world and in the overall stock market it is just as an extraordinary moment being long gold and especially the gold mining stocks.

But I’m involved in a group of alternative FANG stocks, the gold FANGs: Franco Nevada, Agnico-Eagle Mines, New Gold and Goldcorp.

Turkey imports 62.8 tonnes of gold in July

Financial market prices are generally set by the trading venues which command the highest trading volumes and liquidity. This is also true of the gold market where the venues with the highest gold trading volumes - the London over-the-counter and COMEX gold futures markets – establish the international gold price.

However, these two gold markets merely trade paper gold claims in the form of unallocated gold positions (London Gold Market) and gold futures derivatives (COMEX). This trading creates paper gold supply out of thin air and is also highly leveraged and fractional in nature since the paper gold claims are only fractionally backed by real physical gold.

Although these highly leveraged synthetic gold trades have nothing to do with the transacting of physical gold, perversely they still establish the international gold price because physical gold markets merely inherit the gold prices derived in these ‘high liquidity’ paper gold markets.

BullionStar maintains that these paper gold markets cannot price physical gold accurately because they don’t trade physical gold, instead they trade infinitely scalable fractional claims on a smaller amount of physical gold. The international gold price is thus an artificial gold price totally removed from supply and demand in the physical gold markets.

Flows this week