When I first saw the reports from Reuters and Bloomberg that Central Banks bought 399 tonnes of gold in Q3, I was immediately skeptical of the data. As with all other mainstream media precious metals “news” vomit, I suspected the reports contained regurgitated numbers for the purpose of misdirection. As it turns out, Bullionstar’s Ronan Manly takes the WGC to task and exposes the degree to which the report is highly flawed, if not completely fabricated.

Cui bono? The truth-seeking, gold investing community has been exposing the WGC as a fraud for a couple of decades. In all likelihood Central Banks, particularly the ones in the eastern hemisphere, have been quietly accumulating multiples of that 399 tonne number during 2022. But with the massive drain of physical gold and silver from custodial vaults in London and NYC, the WGC likely was compelled to offer an “official”  cover story for the large quantities of metal being transferred into the possession of private entities.

So that leaves “confidential information regarding unrecorded sales and purchases”.

So basically, as you can see, the World Gold Council’s claim of central banks buying over 310 tonnes of unreported purchases in Q3 is based on a suggestion from Metals Focus, which is based on ‘confidential information’. And since no one knows what this ‘confidential information’ is, nor where it came from, there is no way to verify it.

How’s that for “granular and transparent estimates for gold demand”?

So now you can see the problem. Apart from undermining any sense of confidence in the data that the World Gold Council and Metals Focus have seemingly pulled out of the ether, there is also the problem that the major financial news outlets all ran with the 400 tonnes number for Q3 central bank gold demand, and didn’t point out the obvious issues with the data. And this reporting was everywhere this week, in multiple articles all over the world and across the web.

So instead of questioning the data and using some of it’s 4000 London staff to go out and investigate the identity of the central banks in question, Bloomberg is content to run with the World Gold Council / Metal Focus ‘substantial estimate’ that is based on non-verifiable ‘confidential information’, and to write shallow clickbait articles…referring to a secretive bunch of unidentified sovereign buyers. All Bloomberg can do is speculate that it might be China or Russia or India or some of the middle eastern nations.

Read the full article here: Gold Establishment Supports Central Bank Secrecy instead of Exposing it