Last December, thanks to an official Request for Information by means of the Transparency Law, Banxico informed us that:

‘Of the 3.881 million ounces of gold that the Bank of Mexico has at the end of October 2016, 98.95% are held in the United Kingdom, 0.0004% at the Federal Reserve Bank in the United States and the remaining 1.05 % in Mexico.’

Banxico also told us that it had a total of 7,265 gold bars in allocated accounts at The Bank of England (BoE), which means that only about 2.9 million ounces are well identified with serial number, brand code, gross weight, assay and fine weight at that location.

The rest –more than 930,000 gold ounces at the BoE- are still ‘held’ on an unallocated basis. These unallocated accounts are those in which the ‘owner’ has not been assigned specific gold bars but simple ‘rights’ to a certain amount of gold. That is why Banxico could not tell us how many ingots it owned in this last case.