by Ronan Manly, BullionStar:

ust over a week ago I wrote an article highlighting that the Bank of England has begun publishing monthly data on the total quantity of gold bars held within the Bank of England vaults in London. See “Bank of England releases new data on its gold vault holdings”.

This new gold vault data was first released in early April 2017 and covers gold bar holdings at the Bank of England for every month-end for the last 6 years. Going forward, the Bank will publish updates to this dataset every month, on a 3-month lagged basis.

The move by the Bank of England to publish this data was first reported by the Financial Times in February and was supposedly part of a broader gold vault reporting initiative which was to include vault holdings for all 7 of the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) commercial precious vaults in London. These commercial vaults are run by HSBC, JP Morgan, Brinks (on behalf of itself and ICBC Standard), Malca Amit, Loomis and G4S. While the Bank of England had single-handedly gone ahead with its side of the reporting initiative, the precious metals vault holdings data from the LBMA was conspicuously absent when the Bank of England made its move. As I wrote in my article last week:

“The London Bullion Market Association was also expected to publish gold vault holdings data for the commercial gold vaults in London, but as of now, this data has not been published, for reasons unknown.”

“While the Bank of England has now followed through with its promise to publish its gold vault holdings, the LBMA has still not published gold vault data for the commercial gold vault providers, i.e. its members HSBC, JP Morgan, ICBC Standard Bank, Brinks, Malca Amit, Loomis and G4S. Where is this data, why is there a delay, and why has it not yet been published?”

However, as if by magic, the LBMA has now just issued a press release titled “LBMA to publish Precious Metal holdings in London vaults”. Coincidence, perhaps. But whatever the case, the LBMA development is timely, and the press release, which is actually a combined press release from the LBMA and one of its alter egos, London Precious Metals Clearing Limited (LPMCL), makes interesting reading, but unfortunately at the same time is still quite vague, and appears to suggest that some of the vault operators in question have been dragged kicking and screaming to the start line.

Summer of 2017

The statement from the LBMA reveals that:

“from summer 2017 the LBMA will be publishing the gold and silver physical precious metals holdings of the London vaults, with the platinum and palladium holdings to be published at a later date”

The statement also clarifies that “the data only includes physical metal held within the London environs” and that it will cover “aggregate physical holdings”.

Given that the LBMA and Bank of England work very closely, its disappointing and bizarre that the LBMA didn’t coordinate the vault data release at the same time as the Bank of England, because, at the end of the day, this is just some simple holdings data we are talking about, and all the vaults concerned know precisely how much precious metal they are holding at any given moment.

As a reminder, the Bank of England was established by the LBMA in 1987, the Bank of England is an observer on the LBMA Management Committee, and the former head of the Bank of England Foreign exchange Division, Paul Fisher, is the recently appointed ‘independent‘ chairman of the LBMA Management ‘Board’ (formerly known as the LBMA Management Committee). See “Blood Brothers: The Bank of England and the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA)” for more details.

Representatives of the two large commercial vault operators in London, HSBC and JP Morgan, also sit on the LBMA Board. Additionally, representatives of the vault operators HSBC, JP Morgan, Brinks and ICBC Standard Bank also sit on the LBMA Physical Committee and all of the vault operators are represented on the LBMA’s Vault Managers Working Party.

The reference to ‘aggregate physical holdings‘ in the press release is also potentially disappointing as it seems to imply that the LBMA will not break out its vault reporting into how much gold and silver is held by each of the 7 individual vault operators in and around London, but might only publish one combined figure each month end.

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