Gold margins drop 8.3%

CME lowers silver margins by 10%

The Basel 3 accord. The most important change for precious metals is that banks would be required to hold reserves against their assets. Under the coming regulations, banks would count unallocated precious metals at 85 percent of their value on the bank’s books in making the determination of how much it needs to hold in reserves against these assets.

On Monday 1 March, CME Group, which runs COMEX, made a short announcement saying that long time COMEX approved gold and silver vault operator, Bank of Nova Scotia was withdrawing its New York vault from being COMEX approved and that the withdrawal was ‘effective immediately’.

CME raises silver margins 17.9%

Two months ago, Goldman Sachs announced that it had entered into a $500 million agreement to acquire the Perth Mint Physical Gold Exchange Traded Fund (traded in US markets under the symbol AAAU).

With the potential for compromised ownership of the physical gold, the past guarantees of the Perth Mint and the government of Western Australia will no longer offer any recourse.

In a move in early November which is already causing controversy, self-styled gold market authority, the bullion-bank controlled London Bullion Market Association (LBMA), issued a letter to a group of leading bullion markets around the world, threatening to blacklist gold bullion from any country that fails to meet new LBMA recommendations covering gold sourcing and supply chains, the elimination of cash transactions, and the support for artisanal and small scale mining (ASM).

Thus with this new shift from a 3 month to a 1 month vault reporting lag, the COMEX-LBMA gold pool tag team can, with a bit of spin, hold up a copy of the FEMR report and claim that the London vaults have made a Herculean transparency effort, indeed one that has the blessing of regulators, and successfully ‘lobby’ for a COMEX rule change to allow the London vaults a derogation to only report to COMEX on a 1 month lagged basis instead of the daily end of day requirement of their New York brethren.

CME raises silver margins by 15.2%