by Ronan Manly, BullionStar:
After a more than 3 year hiatus, China’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC), is back on the scene claiming the resumption of monthly gold ‘purchases’.
While ‘one swallow does not make a summer’, maybe two do, and now for the second month in succession, China has released data showing significant additions to the PBoC’s monetary gold holdings.
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The first monthly update came on 7 December 2022 when China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE), which publishes China’s official reserve asset figures, showed that during November 2022, the PBoC added 32 tonnes to its monetary gold reserves.
SAFE reports Chinese monetary gold reserves in ‘millions of troy ounces’. The actual announced increase in monetary gold reserves between October and November 2022 was from 62.64 mn ozs (1,948 tonnes) to 63.67 mn ozs (1,980 tonnes), which is an increase of 1,030,000 oz (or 32 tonnes).
At the time on 7 December, BullionStar tweeted that “this latest news on increased PBoC gold reserves could be the start of a new monthly trend by China in announcing monetary gold accumulation”. One month later, this indeed has proven to be the case.
SAFE reports Chinese monetary gold reserves in ‘millions of troy ounces’. The actual announced increase for November 2022 is from 62.64 mn ozs to 63.67 mn ozs, which is 1,030,000 oz, or 32.04 tonnes.
— BullionStar (@BullionStar) December 7, 2022
The second PBoC monthly update came on 7 January 2023, when SAFE’s official reserve update showed that in December 2022, the Chinese central bank added another 30 tonnes of gold to its monetary gold reserves, with PBoC gold holdings rising from 63.67 mn ozs (1,980 tonnes) to 64.64 mn ozs (2,010.53 tonnes). See here for latest SAFE data.
In total, that’s 62 tonnes of gold added to the PBoC’s claimed holdings over the last two months of 2022.
A 37 Month Pause?
Prior to November 2022, the last time China announced a monthly addition to its monetary gold reserves was a whopping 37 months ago in September 2019, when the PBoC ‘added’ 190,000 ozs, or 5.91 tonnes of gold. That was the tail-end of a 10 month period in which the Chinese central bank had claimed to have added a total of 105.8 tonnes of gold between December 2018 and September 2019. See here for SAFE data from 2018-2019.
Prior to December 2018, the previous period in which the Chinese central bank added gold on a consecutive monthly basis was between July 2015 and October 2016 when the PBoC is said to have accumulated 194 tonnes over 16 months (xls SAFE file here).
So you see, China has an ample track record of adding to its published gold reserves over various “consecutive sequences of months”. And China has never published just one month of gold ‘purchases’ and then stopped. It has previously either added gold over a 10 month period (between December 2018 and September 2019), or a 16 month period (between July 2015 and October 2016) or else published updates of ‘big chunks’ at the end of multi year periods of accumulating gold bars.
