China may increase gold reserves beyond Fort Knox level

Mining Weekly.com reports that China’s central bank is being advised to increase its gold holdings nearly ten fold to a level greater than the world’s biggest bullion depository, the US’s Fort Knox.

The market news is quoted as saying:

Global economist David Hale, who addressed the packed Mining Indaba in Cape Town attended by a record 5 700 people, says that China’s gold reserves are currently at 1 050 t – only $30-billion to $40-billion compared with the country’s total assets of $2,8-trillion.

Various officials in China have proposed the central bank should increase its gold reserves to 10 000 t, which would give China larger gold reserves than Fort Knox.

“This would be a huge development for the gold market,” he says, with global mining output of gold only at 2 500 t a year.

“China will probably start to buy gold in the near future, but they won’t report it for two or three years,” Hale says.

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