Golden Minerals Company

A dose of regulatory Viagra for the troubled Vietnamese Dong.

Cheers J

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http://vietnamnews.vnagency.com.vn/showarticle.php?num=02BUS010110

PM suspends public gold trading

(01-01-2010)

HA NOI – All public gold trading floors will be banned effective March 31, 2010, under an order by Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung on Wednesday.

The order requires all gold trading floors to be shut down and all domestic investor accounts terminated by that date, after which time the State Bank of Viet Nam will assume oversight of all trades in the precious metal.

The order also requires the central bank to suspend all 2006 regulations allowing gold trading via accounts abroad.

Jewellery businesses will still be allowed to sell gold jewellery, but the State Bank will draft new regulations limiting how gold can be traded in this form.

After over two years of unregulated trading in gold, the Government has decided to clamp down on what has become a chaotic market driven by speculative behaviour. Gold trading is also undercutting official efforts to regulate monetary policy and stabilise the economy.

"The shutdown is necessary, but had it come sooner in 2008, the costs could have been reduced," said a representative of the Viet Nam Association of Financial Investors (VAFI). "Many trading centres have been set up, taking a large investment of capital to build up staff and infrastructure."

"The shutdown order comes to me like a shock," said investor Phan Anh Ha. "I feel like I did when the authorities banned people from dancing while singing karaoke."

Investors would lose an investment channel, but the State would have one less factor to regulate, said Nguyen Thanh Toai, deputy director of Asia Commercial Bank, the nation’s first credit institution to establish a gold trading floor in Viet Nam.

Black-market gold trading in the past had rattled the authorities, Toai said, which is why they moved the illegal gold trading from the dark alleys into the light of lawful gold trading centres in which it could be monitored and regulated. But now, he said, they were returning it again to the darkness.

Another director of a HCM City based gold trading centre, who asked to remain anonymous, worried that investors might now illegally set up accounts abroad to trade gold online as they used to do before gold trading centres were set up in Viet Nam, causing more dollars to drain out of the domestic economy.

Investors were also likely to seek gold on the black market, where dealers set prices themselves. This happened on November 11 last year, when the domestic gold price spiked to a record high of VND29.3 million and numerous investors suffered heavy losses.

"We are running a market economy, so if we apply too many administrative measures, I personally don’t think it’s good," said Tran Quoc Quynh, a senior official of the Viet Nam Gold Trading Association and a former general director of Vietcombank.

"Investment always makes a balance between profit and risk. That’s their business. Policymakers are just to create legal corridor for them to run," said Quynh.

The State Bank of Viet Nam had submitted to the Government two proposals for better managing gold trading centres, inlcuding closing them down or raising required security deposit rates to 100 per cent.

The resulting shutdown order will affect about 20 gold trading bourses.

There are centres operated by banks, requiring investors to open accounts at the bank; bourses set up by credit institutions or securities companies, requiring investors to deposit money directly with the organisation operating the bourse; and centres allowing institutions and investors to trade gold for gold abroad using US dollars.

Investors have profited from heavily leveraged trading through these centres, and are required to pay a security deposit of only 7 per cent of the total net asset value of their trades, with the remaining 93 per cent backed by the bank.

A called "belief" encouraged investors to bet on the bourses.

Meanwhile, gold bourses were not governed by specific regulations and no single ministry or agency was assigned to oversee their operations.

Illegal short-selling has also occurred at jewellery shops, where gold pledged by a third party was physically sold with the intention of buying it back at a later date before it was returned to the owner.

While State Bank of Viet Nam governor Nguyen Van Giau was not available for comment yesterday, sources suggested that gold bourses would return once the central bank completed a more precise legal framework for them. — VNS