Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Does GLD have the vaulted gold it claims?

I couldn't help noticing a few more inconsistencies with the supposed GLD Vault Bob Pisani was taken around.

Did you notice that all the metal cables ties on the pallets were blue:





but on the HSBC website both the vault pictures posted show black cable ties:



Mmm, maybe the result of the annual audits when it all gets counted. Admittedly all vault pictures have the same coloured yellow struts indicating max. stacking height, so we are probably talking the same vault complex but those standard 6 stack pallets hold 150 bars per pallet = 900 bars per stack.

With 99,000 bars GLD inventory that works out at approx 110 stacks. Whilst the 2 GLD website vault photos appear to be the same room from different angles it is still possible that it could hold 110 stacks totalling the whole GLD Inventory. The vault room shown on the CNBC clip certainly has 110+ stacks in it so between the two we are looking at more than just the GLD inventory. It is probable that a vault will act as storage for more than one client, so who else's gold are we seeing here along with GLD's?

Incidently the wording from the GLD website goes thus:
"The sub-custodians that HSBC use are Bank of England and London Bullion Market Association (“LBMA”) market–making members that provide bullion vaulting and clearing services to third parties."

Anyone enlighten me why the people who store HSBC's bars are; A) sub-custodians and B) market-makers?

More serial nos. of the GLD inventory in the CNBC clip... The frame below taken at 3m40s. We can see four bars serial nos. Each of the first digits I cannot make out but the right 3 end in 23840, 23839 and 23838. The fourth just shows the last two digits '37' consecutive with the other three. The still picture is clearest from the original CNBC clip as opposed to the youtube posted versions.


Interestingly enough the nos. '23837'-'23840' do show up as partial serial nos. in the Sept 2nd pdf inventory. They are listed as Johnson Matthey Brampton bars nos. '123837'-'123840' and that first digit in the picture above could just be a 1, but those bars show a 9995 purity and the JMB bars in the pdf are listed as 9997 purity. Is this a typo in the inventory? Is that a JMB logo on bar 40 above? looks like it. Curiouser and curiouser...
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