More evidence that the mainstream financial media often gets it wrong when reporting on precious metals in general and gold in particular when it comes to reporting on anything other than its price comes via this story at Reuters on Tuesday.
It seized on a few comments at the tail end of a World Gold Council report to craft the sensationally bearish China may have 1,000 tonnes of gold tied in financing – WGC which was not only misleading, but violated some very important rules about context.
Author A. Ananthalakshmi, who according to her page at Reuters has recently dealt exclusively with the mundane, day-to-day reporting on the gold market until this offering, exorcises all of the grey area out of the following paragraph found on page 56 of the World Gold Council’s 57 page report:
The use of gold for purely financial operations is a form of demand that represents a small part of the much wider growth in shadow banking, which while entirely legal, is considered a grey area. Not surprisingly, there is little hard data on the shadow banking sector but J.P. Morgan recently estimated it at RMB46tn (US$1.7tn), equal to about 84% of China’s GDP. No statistics are available on the outstanding amount of gold tied up in financial operations linked to shadow banking but Precious Metals Insights believes it is feasible that by the end of 2013 this could have reached a cumulative 1,000t, equal to a nominal value of nearly $40bn.
It is then offered up as simply this at Reuters:
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