Our friend J.S. writes: "It has been all over the news as well as in GATA Dispatches that countries are starting to use gold to facilitate their international trade. Since paper gold is much greater than the supply of real metal, do you know if these international trade transactions in gold are using the paper price or are they revaluing gold upward to reflect the scarcer supply of real metal?"

This is an excellent question. GATA doesn't know the answer but if we were paying in gold, as China is said to be doing, and if we knew about the gold price suppression scheme, as China does --

http://www.gata.org/node/10380

http://www.gata.org/node/10416

-- we well might ascribe to our gold a value much higher than the price reported by the futures markets. But we can only guess.