My latest article on sharpspixley.com.
It seems to take an awful long time for the publication to appear, but now the Chinese Gold Association (CGA) has published, in Chinese, its 2014 Gold Yearbook and its figures for China’s gold demand that year, and for China’s gold imports, differ strongly from those put out by major precious metals consultancies such as GFMS (which also provided data to the World Gold Council that year), Metals Focus (which is current data provider for the WGC), and CPM Group – the most prominent U.S. based precious metals consultancy. The report on the latest CGA figures to be published came from who else but precious metals chart guru, Nick Laird of www.Sharelynx.com, who monitors China figures extremely closely, and who also published an image from the yearbook showing the actual table from the report
For 2014 for example, the WGC (whose figures seem to be taken as gospel by the world’s major media outlets) reported mainland Chinese gold consumption that year at 813.6 tonnes. The CGA yearbook stated the total Chinese gold demand figure at 2,106 tonnes – which is actually extremely close to the Shanghai Gold Exchange (SGE) withdrawals figure for the same year at 2,102 tonnes. (For 2013 CGA total demand figures were also almost identical to SGE withdrawal figures for that year.) Now while the categorisation of what should actually be included in the WGC consumer demand figure may differ somewhat from what is included in the CGA total demand figure, the 2014 difference of 1,292 tonnes between the two sources stretches belief. Either the WGC (using GFMS figures) got it hugely wrong, or the China Gold Association is including all kinds of things which the WGC isn’t in its calculations…….
To read the full article, which goes into more detail on Chinese gold data, click here
