Category Archive: 6a.) Ronan Manly (Bullionstar)

Main Author Ronan Manly
Ronan Manly
Ronan Manly is an investment professional and research analyst with an interest in the monetary gold market. His career has taken him from Dublin to London, New York, and Frankfurt, in roles spanning portfolio management, stockbroking, and technology, working for companies including Dimensional Fund Advisors and Morgan Stanley. In his time, Ronan has collected various economic and finance degrees, most recently a Master's in Finance from London Business School.

New Gold Pool at the BIS Switzerland: A Who’s Who of Central Bankers

A central bank Gold Pool which many people will be familiar with operated in the gold market between November 1961 and March 1968. That Gold Pool was known as the London Gold Pool.

Read More »

New Gold Pool at the BIS Basle: Part 2 – Pool vs Gold for Oil

This is Part 2 of a two-part series. The series focuses on collusive discussions and meetings that took place between the world’s most powerful central bankers in late 1979 and 1980 in an attempt to launch a central bank Gold Pool cartel to manipulate and control the free market price of gold. The meetings centered around the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basle, Switzerland.

Read More »

New Gold Pool at the BIS Basle, Switzerland: Part 1

“In the Governor’s absence I attended the meeting in Zijlstra’s room in the BIS on the afternoon of Monday, 10th December to continue discussions about a possible gold pool. Emminger, de la Geniere, de Strycker, Leutwiler, Larre and Pohl were present.”  

Read More »

An update on SGE Vault Withdrawals and SGE Price Premiums

In 2016, withdrawals of gold from the Shanghai Gold Exchange totalled 1970 tonnes, the 4th highest annual total on record. This was 24% less than SGE gold withdrawals recorded in 2015, which reached a cumulative 2596 tonnes (See Koos Jansen’s 6 January 2017 blog at BullionStar “How The West Has Been Selling Gold Into A Black Hole” for more details of the 2016 withdrawals).

Read More »

Bank of England releases new data on its gold vault holdings

An article in February on BullionStar’s website titled “A Chink of Light into London’s Gold Vaults?” discussed an upcoming development in the London Gold Market, namely that both the Bank of England (BoE) and the commercial gold vault providers in London planned to begin publishing regular data on the quantity of physical gold actually stored in their gold vaults.

Read More »

Sweden’s Gold Reserves: 10,000 gold bars (pet rocks) shrouded in Official Secrecy

In February 2017 while preparing for a presentation in Gothenburg about central bank gold, I emailed Sweden’s central bank, the Riksbank, enquiring whether the Riksbank physically audits Sweden’s gold and whether it would provide me with a gold bar weight list of Sweden’s gold reserves (gold bar holdings). The Swedish official gold reserves are significant and amount to 125.7 tonnes, making the Swedish nation the world’s 28th largest official gold...

Read More »

Death Spiral for the LBMA Gold and Silver auctions?

In a bizarre series of events that have had limited coverage but which are sure to have far-reaching consequences for benchmark pricing in the precious metals markets, the LBMA Gold Price and LBMA Silver Price auctions both experienced embarrassing trading glitches over consecutive trading days on Monday 10 April and Tuesday 11 April. At the outset, its worth remembering that both of these London-based benchmarks are Regulated Benchmarks, regulated...

Read More »

German and Swiss Precious Metals Refiners join forces as Heraeus acquires Argor-Heraeus

German precious metals group Heraeus Precious Metals (HPM), part of the Heraeus industrial group, has just announced the full acquisition of Swiss precious metals refining group Argor-Heraeus. Heraeus is headquartered in Hanau, just outside Frankfurt. Argor-Heraeus is headquartered in Mendrisio in the Swiss Canton of Ticino, beside the Italian border.

Read More »

Germany’s Gold remains a Mystery as Mainstream Media cheer leads

On 9 February 2017, the Deutsche Bundesbank issued an update on its extremely long-drawn-out gold repatriation program, an update in which it claimed to have transferred 111 tonnes of gold from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to Germany during 2016, while also transferring an additional 105 tonnes of gold from the Banque de France in Paris to Germany during the same time-period.

Read More »

Who Owns the Public Gold: States or Central Banks?

It’s a common misconception that the world’s major central banks and monetary authorities own large quantities of gold bars. Most of them do not. Instead, this gold is owned by the sovereign states that have entrusted it to the respective nation’s central bank, and the central banks are merely acting as guardians of the gold. Tracing the ownership question a step further, what are sovereign states?

Read More »

Gold Market Charts – A Month in Review

BullionStar has recently started a new series of posts highlighting charts relating to some of the most important gold markets, gold exchanges and gold trends around the world. The posts include charts of the Chinese Gold Market, the flow of gold from West to East via the London and Swiss gold markets, and the holdings of gold-backed Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs).

Read More »

European Central Bank gold reserves held across 5 locations. ECB will not disclose Gold Bar List.

The European Central Bank (ECB), creator of the Euro, currently claims to hold 504.8 tonnes of gold reserves. These gold holdings are reflected on the ECB balance sheet and arose from transfers made to the ECB by Euro member national central banks, mainly in January 1999 at the birth of the Euro. As of the end of December 2015, these ECB gold reserves were valued on the ECB balance sheet at market prices and amounted to €15.79 billion.

Read More »

Argor-Heraeus: Another giant Swiss gold refinery goes on the Sales Lot

News has just emerged in the gold market that the giant Swiss precious metals refiner Argor-Heraeus has held discussions to be acquired, and that the likely outcome is an acquisition by a private equity group. This private equity group is believed to be London-based WRM CapInvest, part of Zurich headquartered WRM Capital.

Read More »

London Gold and Silver Fix lawsuits

Five months have lapsed without decision, since London gold and silver benchmark-rigging class action lawsuits received a cool response in a Manhattan court. Transcripts from April hearings show, in the absence of direct evidence, the claims dissected by a “very skeptical” judge, and criticized by defendants for lack of facts suggesting collusion, among other things.

Read More »

The World’s Dominant Gold Refineries

There are many precious metals refineries throughout the world, some local to their domestic markets, and some international, even global in scale. Many but by no means all of these refineries are on the Good Delivery Lists of gold and/or silver.

Read More »

Central Banks & Governments and their gold coin holdings

While this is true in some cases, it is not the fully story because many central banks and governments, such as the US, France, Italy, Switzerland, the UK and Venezuela, all hold an element of gold bullion coins as part of their official monetary gold reserves.

Read More »

How Venezuela Exported 12.5 Tonnes Of Gold To Switzerland On March 8

Submitted by Ronan Manly of Bullionstar Blogs Following on from last month in which BullionStar’s Koos Jansen broke the news that Venezuela had sent almost 36 tonnes of its gold reserves to Switzerland at the beginning of the year, “Venezuela Exporte...

Read More »