By Willem Middelkoop
Commodity Discovery Fund / Seeking Alpha
Even in a time of rapid global news dissemination provided by hundreds of thousands of journalists working around the clock, an observant Dutch blogger can still get a global scoop. How significant a scoop? The true size of China’s massive total gold demand!
Just four years ago, Koos Jansen became intrigued by the relationship between gold and money, after reading my Dutch book “Overleef de kredietcrisis.” In May 2013, he responded to my tweets about the exploding Asian gold demand, after the dramatic fall in the gold price a month earlier. We were surprised to learn that at the time, no reliable statistics of the total Chinese gold demand were available in the English language.
It did appear, however, that the Shanghai Gold Exchange (SGE), the Chinese counterpart of the COMEX, played a crucial role in the Chinese gold trade. Only the goldminerpulse.com website kept track of the ever increasing physical gold deliveries at the SGE, as it monitored the trade on the gold futures index. The site published the following chart, which showed that the total physical delivery had become almost as large as the total world mine production. I used the chart for our annual shareholder meeting, in April 2013.