24% Of The Eligible Gold Was Removed From JP Morgan’s Comex Vault

I have to give credit to my friend/colleague Craig “Turd Ferguson” Hemke – TF Metals Report – for tweeting this piece of information. I don’t monitor the Comex precious metals vault reports everyday.

Yesterday 24% of the “eligible” gold being held – supposedly – in JP Morgan’s Comex gold vault left the premises (click to enlarge):

Briefly to review, the “eligible” gold is the gold that is being “safe”kept at the Comex by investors who took delivery of gold. The Comex actually offers a big discount to the market rate charged for safekeeping to investors who keep their gold in the confines of Comex bank vaults.

I think it’s safe to say that either a big investor who took delivery of the gold and was “safe” keeping it in JPM’s vault decided he would rather provide his own means of safekeeping – understandably so. OR, it’s entirely possible that the gold was hypothecated and the 100 oz. Comex bars were shipped to Swizterland where they will be refined into the kilo bars used on the Shanghai Gold Exchange.

Whatever the case might be, the amount removed was 158k ozs, or a little over 4 tonnes. It’s amusing to contemplate this in the context of when Germany asked for its gold being held at the Fed, it took a year for the Fed to ship 5 tonnes…

Craig points out the amount of gold removed from JP Morgans eligible vault is greater than the total amount of gold in all Comex vaults – as reported – that is classified as being “registered,” or available for delivery. You may note that I keep using the modifier, “as reported.” If you read the area shaded in yellow at the bottom of the Comex report above, you’ll understand why.

With the bubble in Comex paper gold that has formed this year, there is a high probability that anyone who “safe”keeps their gold at the Comex is facing the increasing likelihood of losing the ability to get that gold delivered upon request. Just ask Angela and Jens Weidmann (head of the Bundesbank)…