Word: bullion
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...past two years, a new band of buyers has flocked to the market: American institutional investors. Some U.S. pension funds, mutual funds and bank trust departments are putting a portion of their assets into bullion. Meanwhile, U.S. individuals, professional hedgers and a number of the larger multinational corporations are in the gold futures market. As a result, contracts representing 312 million ounces were written in the first four months of this year, and the level of futures trading in the U.S. dwarfs gold markets abroad. Individual Americans last year also bought at least 3.7 million ounces of gold coins...
...BULLION DEALERS AND BANKERS
Today, along with bullion sales to oil-rich sheiks, monied Asian merchants and Europeans, there is surging demand in the U.S. Of the 54.2 million oz. of gold that entered commerce worldwide last year, almost one-fifth−11.5 million oz.−was sold in America. The largest jump has come in the purchase of South Africa's heavily promoted Krugerrands. Last year the apartheid government in Pretoria minted 6 million of the 1-oz. coins, and nearly 3.7 million were imported by the U.S. That is more than twice as many as were bought the year before...
...largest bazaars for the purchase and sale of the metal remain in London and Zurich. As it has been since 1919, the worldwide price has been set twice a day on the London gold market by five of Britain's leading dealers in bullion. They meet in the offices of N.M. Rothschild & Sons, the City bank, and agree upon a price at which all are prepared to trade in the metal that day. Meanwhile in the U.S. an enormous and highly speculative market in the trading of gold "futures" contracts has developed on the New York Commodity Exchange...
Some forms of gold investment may turn out to be sucker's bets. Anyone with just one Krugerrand can boast about his "gold holdings," but the coins typically sell for 6% to 10% above the going rates paid by dealers for bullion. Worse, some banks and jewelry shops that sell them will not buy them back except at a similar-size discount, and a number of retailers will not repurchase them...