Singapore Makes a $65 Billion Bet on the Future of Gold

详细摘要

For three years, the gold story was about who was buying. In 2026, it has become a story about where the metal sleeps at night. On Tuesday, the Monetary Authority of Singapore…

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For three years, the gold story was about who was buying. In 2026, it has become a story about where the metal sleeps at night.

On Tuesday, the Monetary Authority of Singapore opened its national currency vault, with room for 500 tons of bullion, to foreign central banks and sovereign entities, and threw in a tax break for the wholesale gold trade to sweeten the deal. The launch lands three weeks after Bloomberg reported that wealthy American, European and Middle Eastern investors are already shipping their bars to the city-state, where privately held gold has grown 16-fold since 2014 to more than 800 tons!

None of this will surprise regular readers. We first wrote that Singapore was taking steps to become a global gold hub back in July 2014, when the grand total stored there was a rounding error, and we have spent much of this year documenting the great custody migration out of New York:

The Bloomberg piece is built around Gregor Gregersen, a German-born former bank data architect whose bullion business started under his bed and now occupies The Reserve, a six-story, 180,000-square-foot vault near Changi Airport with room for roughly 10% of the world's annual gold supply and 30% of its silver. His pitch to foreigners is simple: store it far from home.

The numbers suggest the pitch is working. According to estimates from bullion dealer J. Rotbart & Co. cited by Bloomberg, private gold holdings in Singapore topped 800 tons last year, with most of the increase coming from Europe, and the dealer expects more this year and next.

Who is sending it? Pretty much everyone who has read a newspaper lately:

What does a client who plans to leave gold untouched for 30 or 40 years look for in a country? Gregersen has a checklist:

People who want to store gold long-term – 30 or 40 years – usually like to find a country that is wealthy, has no impending pension system crisis, and a country which is…

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