This latest production shutdown by the US Mint also comes on the back of other recent production shutdowns and production scale-backs that have affected everything from the Royal Canadian Mint in Ottawa, to the world’s largest gold refineries in Switzerland, and to South Africa’s Rand Refinery, restricting further the already constrained bullion supply chain globally. While some of the Swiss refineries such as PAMP and Argor-Heraeus have restarted production, this is to a limited extent, and the physical bullion supply chain still remaining challenging.

As a reminder, all of this is happening in an environment of continued enormous demand for gold bullion coins and other physical precious metals, which has led to strong premiums on precious metals bars and coins above the spot prices that the London and New York bullion banks are generating through their relentless synthetic and derivative paper gold churning.