by Bron Suchecki
Gold Chat
Just a quick post on Jan Nieuwenhuijs/Koos Jansen’s article on the refusal of the Dutch Central Bank to publish a bar list. The reason given was that “the conversion of internal lists to documents for publication would create too many administrative burdens.”
I find this excuse weak when gold ETFs can produce bar list in the thousands of pages, and do so without creating any security issue. Even if the custodians where they have the gold have given them a pdf bar list that for some reason contains information that could be a security risk, it should not be a problem to ask that custodian to modify the report/query on their inventory database to exclude such information, or output only the relevant fields of data as a csv file or spreadsheet. If the problem with doing that is that the custodian does not operate an electronic inventory system then we have some serious questions about the control and safety of that custodian’s operations.