Lawrie Williams

Latest gold reserve figures from the Chinese central bank show that the country added another 15.01 tonnes in September.  At September’s average gold price that will have equated to around a little under US$600 million in value.  But total Chinese forex reserves dived by a massive $43.3 billion to their lowest level in over two years, so the official gold purchase figure – if it is to be believed – forms only a very small part of this.

Some see the additional gold taken into the bank’s coffers as yet another indication of China’s intent to diversify its forex reserves out of the dollar, but the amounts are tiny relative to the size of the country’s overall forex reserves which still sit at a massive $3.5 trillion! The big September fall (1.2%) in the latter either suggests a huge programme of mostly dollar denominated sales in order to maintain the country’s current currency relationship with the greenback and to help prop up the domestic economy, or perhaps some other unknown transactions involved – or a combination of both.

We can speculate that one such other transaction could be that China is buying much more gold than it is saying and holding it in other accounts which it doesn’t feel the need to report to the IMF as part of its official gold reserves….

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