If they were smart they would bring ALL of it back home. I am sure they have a safe place to store it somewhere in the country. Didn't Germany finally give up waiting for all their gold? Just my opinion. Jim
It's always been the case that countries want to hold some of their gold in other centers of exchange. The point of the gold is to act as a reserve and medium of exchange. In London to transfer some gold to defend your currency or put it up for audit all you have to do is some paperwork, if it's in Austria you might have to pay to ship it to London or Geneva and that could take a fair amount of time and effort. The other issue of course is that you want to have it geographically a little further from Moscow... There's lots of reasons you would want it in those places and not in the mountains on the Hungarian border. The fact that this repatriation trend exists tells me that they know, or suspect that something is rotten with the way their gold was being stored (perhaps how what they owned was being used by others). Perhaps they simply feared it as a possibly in the future. Whatever the reason the fact that they are undertaking this logistically and bureaucraticically complex task tells me they are starting to at least think about gold a little more. If they had concerns about the security of their metal and didn't care much about gold they could simply have sold it and bought SDR or dollars which they could keep on a balance sheet, but they didn't. Central banks are also now fairly healthy net buyers of gold (thanks in no small part to Russia and China). Honestly if you hadn't seen a price chart in a couple years and someone only briefed you on the supply side problems, plus the Chinese demand, big booming retail demand, this repatriation movement, the state of easy money in the world, geopolitical turmoil and a half dozen other things you'd probably come to the conclusion that the market for gold was doing pretty great. It's just the price chart that's going the wrong way.
You missed the 50% reduction in Western ETFs and who knows how much gold was sold by hedge funds and other pro trades in the OTC market who were riding the momentum trade during gold's run up to $1900 and bailed when it topped out. Maybe, just maybe, that is a negative factor that could swamp your positive factors?
