Market Watch | Sep. 25, 2012

Central banks in the U.S., Europe and Japan may have come forward with stimulus measures in recent weeks to try to  the global economy, but their brethren aren’t necessarily on the same page.

Monetary easing  is widely seen as a boon to gold, which gets its moment in the sun as the go-to investment as soon as the words such as “money printing” and “central bank” start to pop up in the press. So naturally our eyebrows arched when we saw the latest International Monetary Fund numbers for gold reserves out on Tuesday.

It turns out that some central banks are buying gold, with South Korea one of the more notable buyers. South Korea’s reserves increased nearly 30%, from 1.750 million troy ounces in June to 2.260 million troy ounces in July, or roughly 70 metric tons. Russia also bumped its gold rainy-day fund to 30,113 million troy ounces in July from 29,516 million troy ounces in the previous month.

Turkey and Kazakhstan also bought more of the yellow metal. In most cases, countries kept their reserves unchanged in the 30-day period, having added to their reserves at some point in the past couple of years.

The European Central bank kept its gold reserves at 16,142 million ounces. The U.S. also kept its reserves the same from June to July, at 261,499 million ounces, or nearly 9,000 metric tons, mostly stored in an underground vault in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in Manhattan, and yes, Fort Knox, Ky., too.

So the trend of central banks beefing up their gold reserves is alive and well. Now, about that stimulus…

– Claudia Assis