Last night, when observing the unprecedented “gold run” on precious metals dealers which has left all gold vendors with little to no physical gold, we said that “the price of physical gold has decoupled from paper gold” as a result of paper gold liquidations as leveraged funds scramble to cover margin calls using safe assets resulting in an arbitrage that physical gold buyers, i.e., those who don’t have faith in gold ETFs such as the GDX or simply prefer to have possession of the metal, find especially delightful as it allows them to buy physical gold at lower prices than they would ordinarily have access to.

However, we also noted that whereas in the past such conditions were self-correcting, this time it is not only a record surge in demand for physical gold but also a near shut down in supply as the most productive gold refiners, those located in the southern Swiss town of Ticina, namely Valcambi, Pamp and Argor-Heraeus, now appear to be offline indefinitely….CLICK for complete article