Last week, in a move which went largely unnoticed, the US and Chinese gold markets moved one step closer to lockstep, when the CME group, home of the COMEX gold derivatives market and the Shanghai Gold Exchange (SGE), the world’s largest physical gold exchange, simultaneously and jointly launched a series of gold futures products in what they pitched as cross-market cooperation.

The UAE will establish a federal platform for gold trading and the tracking of gold sources, the government has announced.

As the great and the good of the London Gold Market raise a toast to the centenary of the Gold Fixing this September, while lauding the ‘new’ LBMA Gold Price, it would be well to keep in mind the old phrase ‘you can put lipstick on a pig, but its still a pig’.

The LBMA recently

that “it took 89 years for the gold price to break through the $1,000 barrier, reaching a new all-time high of $1,023.50 on 17 March 2008“, to which we have the question what would the gold price be now in the absence of the London Gold Fixings and the LBMA Gold Price?

CME raises Gold Margins from $4k to $4.5k or 12.5%

April was second month this year where delivery notices exceeded registered gold at COMEX

According to the CFTC, the Atlanta-based exchange plans to introduce a 3-millisecond trading delay, one which it calls Passive Order Protection. What is even more interesting is where said delay will be implemented: according to the regulatory filing, the speed bump will be first used on exchange's gold and silver futures contracts "where the ICE currently does very little business", effectively confirming that the gold and silver futures market is where market manipulation by algos has been most rife (something which we already knew thanks to such chronic market manipulators as Deutsche Bank and UBS).

The LBMA trade repository or reporting hub, named

, into which LBMA member firms report their trade data, has a huge amount of trade data that the LBMA could report to the market if it so chose and wished to do so in the interests of market fairness and efficiency. There could be real trade reporting which as a reminder under MIFID takes the form of reporting “basic details of trades almost immediately, so that the information can be circulated in the market, to improve transparency of pricing”.

There could be reporting by client type, such as miners, refiners, central banks, buyside institutions, banks etc, and reporting by trade rationale, e.g. ETF trades interbank trades, exchange for physicals, speculative trading, central bank gold deposits, physical consignment trades etc. In fact the options are practically endless for proper trade reporting when all of the data is in a database, as it is in the LBMA-i reporting hub.

But the LBMA has chosen not to provide any trade reporting at all, and the UK financial authorities have chosen to look the other way. The London gold and silver markets will therefore continue to operate in opacity and with a lack of market efficiency that proper trade reporting would have gone someway to improve.

The London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) will begin publishing data on November 20 that will provide the most accurate picture yet of the size of London’s gold trade, its chief executive said on Monday.

The new LBMA figures will show the total trading activity of LBMA members which make up the bulk of the London market and are expected to be much larger than the clearing statistics.

In March of this year, the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) released a series of short videos about various aspects of the London precious metals markets and the role the LBMA claims to plays in those markets.

It is the ‘Who we Are’ and ‘How the Market Works’ videos which are worth discussing in the context that neither answers the questions that their titles suggest.

The five banks that settle every transaction in London’s $6.8 trillion a year gold market are changing the rules of their clearing house to make it easier for newcomers to join.

The reform is part of a broad overhaul of institutions that underpin the world’s largest bullion trading center to make them more transparent after accusations of price manipulation by banks and traders and pressure from regulators.