As the global law firm Dentons explained:

“the reality of unallocated bullion trading is that buyers and sellers rarely intend for physical delivery to ever take place. Unallocated bullion is used as a means to have “synthetic” holdings of gold and so obtain exposure to the price of gold by reference to the London gold fixing.

If physical settlement and cash settlement are two mutually exclusive concepts (as they are in our view) and if cash settlement entails a derivatives transaction it follows that, if physical settlement does not take place in connection with unallocated bullion, then unallocated bullion is a form of derivatives transaction.“

But importantly, the London Gold Market, along with COMEX are the two most influential trading venues for gold price discovery and for establishing the international gold price, even though the trading in both venues is far removed from trading physical gold.

So next time you see the LBMA release clearing data and vault holdings data, as it does at the beginning of every month, its worth picturing these two sets of data, not as two distinct datasets, but as two interrelated sets of data where a tiny amount of physical gold in London vaults, ‘underpins’ vast amounts of trading in fictional ‘gold’, and where mainstream financial journalists fear to tread or ask questions as to how this Ponzi scheme came into existence and has been allowed to go on for so long.

How longs a piece of string?

That’s what happened in Vancouver housing in September, when according to the Real Estate Board of Vancouver (REBGV), residential property sales tumbled by 17.3% from August 2018, and a whopping 43.5% from one year ago.

Goes along with China Real Estate Market………and London.