therealasset.co.uk / by JAN SKOYLES / MAR 3 2014
The gold price continues to benefit from the ongoing political tensions over Russia’s involvement in Ukraine. Overnight the price of gold rose to its highest since October 2013.
February was quite a month for the silver price, which benefitted from gold’s performance. Climbing 11% last month the precious metal outperformed gold’s 7% monthly rise.
Last month, safe-haven demand was spurred and gold backed ETFS saw their first monthly increase in holdings since December 2012.
In contrasting news, volumes on the Shanghai Gold Exchange fell last week to levels seen two weeks before. The yellow metal was trading at a discount to the London Gold Fix.
Ongoing scrutiny over London Gold Fix
A draft-paper written by New York University’s Stern School of Business Professor Rosa Abrantes-Metz and Albert Metz, a managing director at Moody’s Investors Service, is the latest in a line of developments that suggests the five-banks involved in the Fix are doing something underhand.
Bloomberg reports, “The structure of the benchmark is certainly conducive to collusion and manipulation, and the empirical data are consistent with price artificiality,” they say in the report, which hasn’t yet been submitted for publication. “It is likely that co-operation between participants may be occurring.”