Does any nation hold the gold it says it does?
By GCRU Gold News on Thursday, April 23 2015, 22:57 - Permalink
It’s all a question of accounting and presentation of statistics. In truth the major central bank holders of gold only tell the IMF what they want the world to believe are their actual attributable gold holdings and the true amounts of accessible physical gold currently held on their own behalf are quite probably somewhat different in a number of cases.
There are two potential factors at play here. A central bank may wish to obscure its actual gold holdings for political reasons or for financial ones (currency support). China has been widely believed to have been buying gold in quantity and boosting its reserves in secret by holding this gold in a separate account which it thus considers it does not need to report to the IMF as it is thus not yet part of its official reserve.
Meanwhile, a number of Western central banks are believed to have leased out much of their gold to the bullion banks. These, in turn have offloaded the gold to clients or the general market (perhaps much of it ending up in China) or used it as collateral.