Charterhouse

Apart from the fact that the world is full of goldbugs like yourself right now....... Anyway, I read it explicitly in a press release, I will continue to try and dig it out again, but I do have a day job to do

Yeah the conference call guy seemed a bit clueless to be honest. http://mostlyeconomics.wordpress.com/2009/...t-more-details/ makes it clear it is a "market-based" number not a market price. Sadly I can't find the press release that I found the other week that made the discount explicit, but from a practical point of view a discount makes sense.

That isn't even right though is it - 32,150.746 troy ounces to the metric tonne.

I can't find the exact stuff I was looking at now but there's a quote in the press release that makes it very clear there was a discount to market prices. It'll be on the IMF website. The Reuters story alludes to it as well:- "The Reserve Bank of India said the purchase was an official sector off-market transaction and was executed during Oct. 19-30 at market-based prices." i.e. market based prices not market prices.

The conference call did not say this, it said that the reference price was $1,045. If you go into the details it says that there was an agreed discount to the reference price. If you then work out the size of the sale and the overall price paid (which I assume is right) it divides through and the maths gives an uncannily even $100 discount to the average REFERENCE price of $1,045. [e] I'm not in the slightest surprised that the IMF wanted to imply that India paid $1,045 an ounce. But unless the overall sale value is wrong (which I very much doubt), they didn't pay that at all.

Just FYI, and I don't want to come across as "OMG SOMEONE IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET", but India bought that IMF gold at a $100 discount to the average spot price over a 2 week period, or $949 per ounce. So for anyone to theorize that there is some sort of floor at $1,045 is wrong.