On another point, this underlines warnings I have read about the dangers of trying to hedge one's savings by investing in gold via exchange traded funds vs owning the metal. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
The writer got his facts wrong. The 90% provision was aimed to rein in scam artists selling "look-alike" contracts off-exchange to mug punters. It's an obsolete provison, because the scam artists have moved on to more lucrative techniques like CDS and CLOs....
There's nothing odd about big dealers like DB borrowing gold from central banks to make exchange deliveries either, although I grant you the size of this delivery is way out of the ordinary.
I wouldn't touch gold with a barge pole. It's been manipulated by the big dealers and Central Banks since for ever. "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
