John Brimelow's Gold Jottings 

Strategic insights and advice on the global gold market. 

 

Daily Newsletter

Gold Jottings provides expert evaluation and analysis of short-term prospects for the gold market and price. Our newsletter is published twice a day, with the morning edition focused on Asian premiums and the evening edition summarizing the data points emerging during the U.S. day including particularly the Preliminary open interest report from the CME which is usually posted about 10:30PM EST. Our service is designed for institutional consumers.

Today the internet allows virtually real-time premium information to be acquired promptly and analyzed accurately. This is a revolution: a generation ago premium information was greatly delayed and often only anecdotal. Every day, Gold Jottings tracks the relationship between the domestic price of gold in certain key consuming markets – notably India and China – and the world price.

In addition to the key Indian and Chinese markets, Gold Jottings monitors local prices in several other countries, including Vietnam, Japan and Turkey. The effect of these countries on the global gold market fluctuates but their importance for global market movement calls for constant attention and analysis of their changes.

Gold Jottings also collects a number of other data points which have been found over the years to have bearing on the gold market. These include the U.S. gold share action, the sentiment indices, ETF and closed end fund behavior, and the open interest and volume on the U.S and other futures exchanges. Also the London Fix details, which are now only posted at Midnight U.K. time.

Gold Jottings also seeks to identify commentaries and macroeconomic information which might be influential to the gold price evolution. We are not a news aggregator and we base our analysis on market data, not news coverage.

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John Brimelow

John Brimelow is the founder and and Principal of JBGJ LLC, the Publisher of Gold Jottings. For almost 30 years John operated as a selling analyst with various Wall Street brokerage firms, specializing in precious and other metal equities.

Having been educated and worked in times of repeated severe currency crises, John became interested in gold. After graduating from Stanford Business School he worked for several years in the International Division of Bank of America’s predecessor, North Carolina National Bank before moving to New York to begin a career as a sell-side analyst for various Wall Street brokerage firms.

Later in his career, John became very interested in how, thanks to the internet, it was possible to judge how strong Asian demand for gold actually was by looking at local premiums. This was important since Asian private dealers replaced Central Banks as the default buyer of gold in the 1970s but accurate intelligence about what was happening was very difficult to obtain. Initially supplied to brokerage clients, Gold Jottings has been offered as a free-standing consultancy service since 2009.

John was educated at the University of Sussex, U.K. (B.A.) and at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business (MBA) which he attended on a Fulbright scholarship.

Padmanabhaswamy Temple, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India

In 2011 it emerged that in vaults under the Temple staggering quantities of gold, diamonds and pearls had been deposited, accumulated from offerings by devout worshippers over many centuries. Value estimates, without considering craftsmanship or artistic value, have ranged as high as $30 billion or possibly 500 tonnes of gold at 2019 values. This would rank the Temple 13th in the list of Central Bank holders. The Reserve Bank of India as of September 2017 is 11th at 557.8 tonnes.

A major vault remains to be opened.

Significantly, the discoveries include “several hundred thousand” gold coins from the Roman Empire and many dating back to the 2nd Century BC.

This highlights the reason the Temple could accumulate these assets: the southeastern coast of India was the primary source of a range of spices avidly demanded by other areas of the world from ancient times. Generally only precious metals were accepted in exchange for these exports. The Roman author Pliny the Younger complained of the drain of precious metals spice imports caused for the Roman Empire.

Incredibly to Western eyes, no move has been made by Indian politicians to seize this wealth. The statement has been made that it is the property of the God.

Numerous other Indian temples are known to have considerable holdings of gold and silver although the Padmanabhaswamy Temple is presumed to be an extreme case.


The story is a paradigm of India’s appetite for gold, enthusiasm for holding it, and extreme unwillingness to let it go.