Is the Comex Doing Fractional Reserve Delivery of Gold?
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Is the Comex Doing Fractional Reserve Delivery of Gold?

An acquaintance who works for a small precious metals fund sent this to us today, asking if we had ever heard of anything like it.

The short answer is no, but this is not a strong area of specific expertise, and we never attribute to a bad intent what we can attribute to sheer incompetency, especially when dealing with large organizations.

But nevertheless it does bring into question the integrity of the Comex records and their contracts, and the condition of their audits and invetories.

When you are promised specific bars with specific serial numbers of a specific size and weight one week, and they are not available the next when you actually affirm that you wish to receive them, that brings up the same kind of red flags that have been so notoriously ignored by regulatory agencies in other recent cases. Of course the Comex is no Bernie Madoff.

But it does put a fresh emphasis on the old adage, "When in doubt, take it out."

We accumulated 3 emini gold contracts on Comex for December delivery and we had been given serial numbers and weights last week for the 3 bars we were to receive.

Today we are informed that Comex, which is now a division of NYSE Liffe, is invoking a rule in which they can deny delivery of individual mini bars (roughly 33 ounces) and issue you only a Warehouse Delivery Receipt (WDR) against your mini-contract unless you have 3 WDR's, and then they'll issue you a 100 oz. bar.

Otherwise, if you have only 1 or 2 mini-contracts, you only own a WDR, which you sell by shorting a mini against it. If you own a WDR for a 100 oz., the WDR issuance encourages you to safekeep the gold at the Comex.

CLEARLY, the Comex has run out of the bars that were being delivered to holders of emini contracts. Our back-office guy told us that he's been doing Comex deliveries for 30 years and he's never seen anything like this, and he's never heard of this NYSE Liffe rule on the mini contract.

Fortunately we have 3 WDR's and we will be getting delivery of a 100 oz. Comex gold bar.

But this whole episode brings into the question the validity of the Comex gold inventory. More importantly, the Comex is now going to issue WDR's, which are paper.

Are they becoming a "fractional" reserve depository, where they can issue several WDR's against the same bar of gold, knowing that some of those people will opt to keep storage on Comex and never require actual physical delivery?