>>60763105
>>60763150
You’re looking at this only through the gold gets more expensive lens and missing what’s actually happening here. This is about the U.S. taking control over where and how benchmark gold prices are set and specifically targeting the exact bar formats COMEX accepts for delivery (1 kilo and 100 oz). Those formats are the backbone of New York price discovery. If you control the supply of those bars into COMEX, you control a big part of the market.
Let’s take a look at all angles here. The idea some have that they’ll just resize bars isn’t as simple as it sounds. To turn a 400 oz London bar into COMEX deliverable 100 oz or 1 kilo bars, you need an approved refiner, strict chain of custody, proper assays, stamping, and enough capacity. That capacity doesn’t exist in unlimited amounts, and if the gold came from Switzerland originally, the tariff still applies unless it’s recast outside the U.S. which removes the Swiss brand premium and still requires COMEX approval.
Sending the bars to London doesn’t solve it either. That just makes it London metal, and COMEX shorts in New York still need to deliver New York bars. That widens the price difference between London and New York, pushes up the New York premium, and forces shorts to pay more.
Switching to refiners in the UAE, Turkey, or China has its own problems. Many aren’t COMEX approved for these formats, and some have anti money laundering concerns that make banks and insurers avoid them. Non approved bars are harder to finance and carry bigger costs.
As for China the idea that they can flood the market, that’s not realistic. Chinese kilo bars are traded on the Shanghai Gold Exchange, and exports are tightly restricted. They aren’t automatically accepted in COMEX custody, and the rulebook is different.
