“Our clients will call up saying ‘I hear the Comex is running out of gold, what do you make of it?’ and our quick answer is that this is a non-issue,” Jeffrey Christian, managing director at CPM Group, said in a telephone interview. 

“Even if you look at the fact that registered stocks have declined, the fact of the matter is most Comex futures contracts” are cash-settled, and traders don’t take delivery of the metal, he said. 

While the percentage of Comex gold open interest covered by total Comex reported stocks has fallen over the past year and a half, it “remains very high by historical standards and presents no perceptible risk of imminent problems with deliveries,” CPM Group said in a report dated Sept. 14…

Barclays Plc said in a report this week that emerging-market demand for gold has shifted some metal into Asia, and that “coverage of physical stocks in Comex remains solid.”

Joe Deaux, Gold Shortage Theory Derided as Comex Seen Well Supplied, Bloomberg News, Sept 16, 2015

Here is a commentary on the physical bullion situation at the Comex as it was reported at Bloomberg News yesterday. The ‘deriding’, which means ridicule and contempt, is coming from CPM group’s Jeff Christian, and from a report from Barclays.

The title of the article is a bit odd, because I have not see any ‘theories’ about this subject at least here, just presentations of the facts using exchange provided information. And as for deriding, it seems more like a sign of weakness and fear than solid reassurance. But that is just my own experience in seeing that sort of thing when someone points out a changing situation that could pose a problem.

One thing the story fails to make clear is that only registered gold is deemed deliverable to fulfill futures contracts. Yes, all the gold in all the warehouses could potentially satisfy demand, IF IT WAS UP FOR SALE. But it is not.

The total supplies at the Comex have as much to do with the current demand for bullion as all the automobiles in your neighborhood have on the price that you are going to pay tomorrow for a used car, eg. the calculation cannot include items that are not up for sale. Yes there are many cars that would satisfy your requirements. But only those that are for sale are available for you to drive home.

Jeff Christian says that “even if you look at the fact that registered stocks have declined…”

Yes and that is quite the understatement.

Here is the history of ‘registered gold bullion’ on the Comex going back to 2001.