For those who have at times struggled to understand the difference between COMEX inventory categories ‘registered gold’ and ‘eligible gold’, now your head can spin even more, since the CME’s COMEX has just introduced a new category – ‘pledged gold’.

Which will mean an even smaller pool of registered gold to keep COMEX gold futures trading going, a paper gold trading casino which is actually a giant Ponzi scheme, but for the time being is unfortunately and perversely still nearly single-handedly responsible for international gold price discovery in the global gold market.