Gunvor’s move away from physical commodities trading in itself is not surprising: recall that first it was Germany banking titan Deutsche Bank which announced it would no longer trade physical precious metals last month.
According to Bloomberg at least two traders are leaving the company in Geneva and Singapore: Francois Beuzelin, hired in 2012 as head of metals in Geneva, and Cedric Chanu, who started in Singapore in January as a precious-metals trader. Chanu declined to comment by phone and Beuzelin didn’t answer calls to his office nor an e-mail sent via his LinkedIn account.
But the biggest surprise in this story was the reason why Gunvor chose to discontinues its gold trading. Per Bloomberg, “executives decided to abandon the precious metals trading business partly because of difficulties in finding steady supplies of gold where the origin could be well documented, one of the people said.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I was reminded yesterday of the following saying: Whoever has the most gold wins. As Ann Barnhardt succinctly stated: “If you cannot defend it with an AR-15, you don’t own it”. There is an exception to this rule that I call the Obama Corollary. It is the national debt that has been used to enslave us.
David DeGerolamo
