Tuesday, February 8, 2011

JP Morgan to accept physical gold bullion as collatera

From Gold Core:

JP Morgan announced today that from now on they will accept physical gold bullion as collateral. This is a sign of gold’s further remonetisation in the global financial and monetary system. It may signal that JP Morgan is having difficulty in securing gold bullion in volume. JP Morgan is the custodian for many of the gold and silver exchange traded funds. They will not accept ETF trust gold as collateral.

In October, the clearing house of global exchange CME Group – CME Clearing – announced it will now accept gold as collateral for trades on the exchange. Gold bullion can be used for margins for CME trades, ranging from crude oil, gold, grains, equity indexes and Treasury bonds.

Given the current monetary, macroeconomic and geopolitical risk gold is an attractive alternative to debt, equities or other paper assets as collateral.

JP Morgans’s move shows how gold bullion’s fungiblity and tangibility as an asset makes it attractive and shows gold’s increasing importance in the financial system.

Interestingly, the CME is storing their collateral gold at JP Morgan Chase Bank in London. The exchange said it hoped to add additional depositories in the future but there has been no announcement of developments in this regard.

Silver prices remain in backwardation, showing that buyers are willing to pay a premium for silver delivered sooner rather than later.

Both gold and particularly silver are vulnerable to a short squeeze that propels prices beyond their recent record nominal highs. In the gold market that are some 80,000 short contracts which is more than 30% than the average short position in 2010.

The concentrated shorts who the CFTC has been investigating will be nervous and given the strong fundamentals in the bullion market may be forced to buy back their positions in order to protect themselves from significant losses.

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