Gold News

The Italian government has clashed with the European Central Bank this week after one of Italy’s largest newspapers, La Stampa, published an article claiming that the coalition government was planning to sell off a large chunk of the country’s gold bullion holdings - potentially up to 600 tonnes of gold.

The spot price for Palladium has set further record prices this week, peaking today at $1,419.37 per ounce - $100 per ounce more expensive than gold and up by $152.37 per ounce since New Year’s Day – a 12% rise in value.

South American mining company Hochschild Mining PLC has announced that it is to shutdown its operations at the Arcata mine in Peru.

The low silver price has forced the company’s hand into putting the Arcata site into a “care and maintenance” mode for the foreseeable future, will full shutdown complete by the end of Q2 2019.

British households are £1,500 worse off since the decision to leave the European Union was announced, according to one leading thinktank.

The Resolution Foundation, an independent UK thinktank which specialises in the standard of living, has today published statistics showing that households are roughly £600 per year worse off as a result of the subsequent economic uncertainty in the past two and a half years.

The Russian government is debating whether or not to scrap VAT on investment gold. Despite Russia’s position as the world’s largest buyer of gold in 2018, and the third largest producer of gold, the country only experiences demand of around 3 tonnes per year from the public, and the 20% VAT rate is believed to be the culprit for such low levels of interest in gold as an investment option.

The Royal Mint has announced a new gold bullion coin for 2019 – the Royal Arms 1oz gold coin. 

The coin, released on Monday, features Timothy Noad's take on the Royal Coat of Arms, as previously used for collectable £1 coins produced by the Mint in 2015.

The Bank of England today admitted there is a 1 in 4 chance of a recession later this year following drastically adjusted growth forecasts for the UK economy. The combined threat of a no-deal Brexit, plus slowing growth in both China and the Eurozone, has forced the BoE to re-estimate the outlook for the UK in the coming months.

Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, has come under fire in recent days after it was revealed that he had sold off part of the nation’s gold reserves to the United Arab Emirates.

The country also sold $900 million worth of unrefined gold (23.6 tonnes approximately) to Turkey in 2018, with US intelligence suspecting re-sale of the refined gold from Turkey to neighbouring Iran.

India’s government are beginning planning work for a national gold spot exchange, which would regulate the price of gold and the gold trade as a whole straight from import.

The Pound has fallen back below $1.31 today following the latest manufacturing figures from IHS Markit. The 0.3% drop against the Dollar was accompanied by a 0.5% drop against the Euro, with Sterling now at €1.1399.

Sterling fell earlier this week following the results of Tuesday's Brexit voting in Parliament, with the Prime Minister voting against her own deal in order to press for fresh negotiations with EU leaders.

The US Federal Reserve announced last night that interest rates would remain between 2.25% and 2.5%, with the Fed preparing for a slower year of economic growth in America.

Annual gold demand was up in 2018, with the highest Central Bank purchases in 50 years helping to drive demand, but with reported shrinking of Silver supplies could 2019 be the year Silver’s price begins to rise?

Italy’s economy has slipped back into recession following a poor end to 2018. ISTAT, the Italian National Institute of Statistics, reported that between October and December the economy contracted by 0.2%.

Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte accidentally revealed the decline of the Italian economy at an event in Milan yesterday, and added that the first half of 2019 is likely to be similarly poor.

The price of gold has climbed above the £1,000 per ounce mark once again, after last night’s series of Brexit votes in the House of Commons.

MPs gathered to cast their votes on seven amendments to the Prime Minister’s Brexit deal, which remarkably featured Theresa May backing Sir Graham Brady’s amendment to abandon the Irish backstop and enter renegotiations with Europe – something she had previously arranged and said was not possible to amend.

The CEO of the Russian trading floor Moscow Exchange has suggested to Russian MPs that his company – and the wider country – should utilise its position as the third largest producer of gold in the world and offer gold to investors as an alternative to the US Dollar.

In the wake of Bitcoin’s latest slump, one CEO believes that Bitcoin’s moment of glory is over, and those who bought into it are now realising that gold, not Bitcoin, is the long-term haven to back.

Police in Hong Kong have arrested 12 men and two women who they believe are responsible for running a gold scam in the Chinese special territory.

The World Gold Council believes 2019 will see an increase in demand for gold, which will subsequently drive prices up as the year goes on. The latest publication from the WGC stated that they “expect that the interplay between market risk and economic growth in 2019 will drive gold demand”.

The price of gold in US Dollars was relatively flat and stable in 2018, ending the year down by 1.5% and recording the first annual decline in gold price since 2015, but in 2018 gold set record high prices or near highs in 72 currencies, and came close to records for the likes of the Pound Sterling, Swiss Franc, Euro and Chinese Yuan - all of which suffered from the US Dollar’s fierce rise in popularity.

The Pound Sterling rose to a two-month high point yesterday following another flat and progress-lacking round of Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons.

Sterling reached $1.30 and €1.14 respectively as of yesterday’s morning trading, and has held these levels since, with investors confident that a no-deal Brexit scenario is all but certain to be avoided.