➡ India recently reduced taxes on gold and silver, leading to a significant increase in imports of these metals. This has resulted in a boost in the silver market and record gold imports in dollar terms. Meanwhile, China is implementing measures to stimulate its economy, including a mortgage rate cut and a new liquidity facility for securities firms, funds, and insurance companies to buy stocks.

About a month ago India lowered the taxes on gold and silver which has obviously had its impact not just in gold but also on the silver side. Well hello there my friends Chris Marcus here with you for RK to economics and today we are going to dig into some big gold and silver import numbers in India as well as some news out of China and a few other gold and silver stories that I believe are worth updating so with that said let us jump in where I am recording on Tuesday afternoon and as you’re well aware by the time you’re seeing this we’ve had another quite significant rally gold up 35 dollars and in particular silver up at 32.56 as of the time this recording and about 20 cents off of the high from earlier this year so quite quite a roller coaster it has been in the silver market dipping below 27 at one point after reaching that 32.74 high and has rebounded and now back up at 32.55 so certainly good news on silver and perhaps some of the things driving that let us dig in because as I mentioned India reported record gold imports in August and to be clear this is by in dollar terms not necessarily overall tons yet still quite a significant number and if we take a look here at India gold imports they imported 140 tons as you can see which by tonnage in the last 10 years puts that about third place and in fact we can take a look longer back so you can see there were a couple of spikes this one is showing over the last 24 years so you have let’s call it one two three four five months where you had a larger tonnage imported but again this in some ways does not come as a complete surprise because about a month ago India lowered the taxes on gold and silver which has obviously had its impact not just in gold but also on the silver side here where now we do not have the latest figure updated which actually came in at 1421 tons in August on the silver side which would put that in fifth place not as big as the record setting month that we saw back in February but in fifth place so a pretty decent score on that one we take a longer look back and historically this would put this August figure at sixth place so certainly we are seeing the impact on the silver side and here a tweet from Peter Spina this is measuring it by the US dollar amount so here you can see with the higher gold price that by US dollar amount a record of imports on the gold side into India so a lot of metal going in there and one other look as we take a closer view at the metals focus chart pack here you see the red bars are the 2024 figures the pinkish mixed with a little bit of orange bars let’s call them 2023 figures and certainly what we just saw here in August biggest one we’ve seen in the last two years and you saw the comparisons on those other charts here in terms of silver there is the 1421 ton import figure which as I mentioned less than the record setter back in February but still helping to keep India on pace at least prorated pace they would be close to the 2022 yearly record that was set when India imported about 300 million ounces of silver so a lot of metal going into India especially as they’re ramping up their solar production certainly could see more of that wonder if this will subside a little bit as the impact of the tax reduction is felt but either case that is what we had in August and I mentioned that there was also some news out of China on Tuesday morning which Vince lancy covered in his morning show although some of these really rather stunning in their own sense so wanted to take a quick walk through there as he mentions China fires a policy bazooka to boost the economy led by a mortgage rate cut and as we see here the reserve requirement ratio the amount of cash that the commercial banks must hold as reserves and the mortgage rate for existing housing would be cut by half a percentage point and then if you go a little farther down this was the part that I found pretty stunning pboc will set up a swap facility allowing securities firms funds and insurance companies to tap liquidity from the pboc to buy stocks brokers funds and insurers will be allowed to pledge assets in exchange for liquidity for funds and to buy stocks and the pboc will set up a separate specialized refinancing facility for listed companies and major shareholders to buy back shares and raise holdings we’ve seen things like this at points in the past 10 years and obviously things not going ideally especially in the real estate sector in China so we are seeing some easing out of China following easing out of the Fed and what will likely not be the last time in either and of course mentioned that the gold and silver prices are surging which interesting timing because here taking a quick look at the report released last Friday we can see the managed money adding plenty of longs over 11 600 reducing their shorts by 2100 and then in the swap dealers you can see after we saw this the short position reduced a bit over the previous each of the previous two weeks quite a jump here as the banks add 6300 shorts and let go of 2300 longs similar picture in gold here you can see let’s call that about 2600 net long position added by the managed money and the short position really blowing out here adding another 13 000 contracts which puts us again in record territory here is our gold chart and down here is the green line which is the swap dealers now if you see right above my mouse there that 194 negative 194 000 meaning the banks this point in time are short that amount i’ll put that over here so now you can see they’re short 257 000 contracts and we had the previous record here about two weeks ago at 253 000 so they are more short and that cutoff line was as of the close on last Tuesday so assuming that has not changed substantially which may have a little bit in the past couple of days but certainly losing money on the increase in prices that we are seeing today similar pattern in the silver side again we had not recently hit a record in terms of silver short position by the banks as they were more short back in the rally in 2016 but aside from that we are still significantly short as you can see 40 000 contracts short and if we go back here you can see about a month ago got down to a position of 43 000 contracts short by the bank so certainly a tough day when you see gold up 30 bucks silver up a buck 44 right now so again after two weeks of seeing them reduce that short position it is higher now and a few last notes that i wanted to go over here today did see this came out a couple of days ago where HSBC has approved a quantum safe technology for tokenized bullions and HSBC claims to have successfully trialed the first application of quantum technology for buying and selling tokenized physical gold which on one hand seems good and certainly to the degree that banks with large exposure are creating new gold products or that there’s interest in gold i think a positive yet keep in mind that there’s HSBC back in 2018 fine for spoofing in the metals markets by the CFTC and here we have back uh just a couple of weeks ago last month Goldman HSBC and others to pay 20 million in a probe this was for platinum and palladium so again is this to say that what they are offering here in their quantum holdings is not safe it may well be but just be cautious when you’re out there looking at some of these products and certainly anything where tokenized gold and silver would be careful about going through the audits and making sure you’re protected there and another one that i found interesting not necessarily because of what is in the article i mean a lot of things that we’ve talked about plenty here on the show the reports of the deficit the conditions in declining inventories and a lot of the silver institute data although just thought it was noteworthy that we’re seeing this on international banker and on one hand not a surprise that you would see more coverage as the prices go up as the fed does what the fed has just done in going the 50 basis points rather than 25 which again i know we’ve talked about it quite a lot over the past couple of months but expecting that that might be what finally got the western investing side into the market and certainly that has been happening so far as we’ve had inflows over the past four months consecutively into the ETFs for both gold and silver and we’ll see what happens from here as more attention is placed on it and anyway with all that said going to wrap up for today but did want to thank first majestic silver who helps to bring us this show each day and obviously first majestic just recently completed an agreement to purchase gato silver and as i had mentioned fortunately uh did finally catch up with keith new meyer earlier today and got his thoughts on the deal as well as some of the other issues that the company is facing going forward into key hurdles so to find out a little bit more about how things are going there well just click on the video that’s coming your way now
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