Well respected fund manager sees China raising gold price and using the metal to back Yuan for oil trading

4:05 PM 2017, china, gold, gold price, john hathaway, markets, oil, shanghai gold exchange, yuan No Comments

John Hathaway of Tocqueville Gold Fund is a well respected analyst with over 45 years in the markets, and in precious metals.  On Jan. 13 he published his expectations for gold, currencies, and geo-politics in 2017, and is forecasting two interesting events to take place this year.

China looking to dominate world oil trade through a gold backed Yuan

Next is the incorporation of gold as a settlement currency to facilitate trade between oil-producing nations and the world’s largest hydrocarbon importer, China. Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran are settling most, if not all, of their energy sales to China in yuan convertible into physical gold via the Shanghai Gold Exchange. That flow represents a significant and growing percentage of international oil commerce, which in turn represents a dominant share of all commodities. - King World News

China preparing to radically reprice gold higher

We believe that this development has negative implications for the petrodollar system that has underpinned the dollar’s dominance in global commerce since the 1970s. Physical settlement, as opposed to paper (cash-settled) gold contracts, ramps up the migration of physical metal to Asian owners. Gold has become a reserve asset that is preferred to US Treasuries. Comments below by Xu Luode, chairman of the Shanghai Gold Exchange, show that the Chinese have made no secret of their strategy to internationalize the renminbi through gold convertibility in order to displace the US dollar: 

"Foreign investors can directly use offshore yuan to trade gold on the SGE international board, which is promoting the internationalization of the renminbi…Shanghai Gold will change the current gold market “consumption in the East priced in the West” situation. When China will have a right to speak in the international gold market, pricing will get revealed… (Xu Luode, speech to LBMA, May 2014)"

Since November of last year, the Shanghai Gold Exchange has already begun to disconnect its price fixing from the London and New York markets, with some daily spreads reaching as high as $49 per ounce.  This will continue to occur, and most probably accelerate in light of the revelations provided by Deutsche Bank and Wikileaks on the fact that Western banks have been manipulating the price of gold for decades.