Gold Coin And Bar Shortages Likely To Lead To Rationing
GoldCore
GoldSeek.com
Monday, 13 January 2014
The Perth Mint’s Bron Suchecki has written an interested blog post regarding the real risk of gold coin shortages and rationing happening again:
The extraordinary demand for precious metals coins following the 2008 global financial crisis caught the minting industry by surprise, resulting in never before seen coin rationing and shortages.
It seems not much has changed, with recent reports that the UK Royal Mint ran out of 2014 Sovereign gold coins due to “exceptional demand”, as well as the continuation for over one year of an allocation program first put into place early 2013 by the US Mint on its ever popular silver Eagle bullion coins.
While these recent events have been limited to specific coins, with availability of other leading bullion coins like the Perth Mint’s gold Kangaroo not affected, it does seem to indicate that worldwide minting production capacity is still unable to meet demand surges.
However, it is little appreciated that the bottleneck in the global coin minting process is blank (planchet) manufacture. This is a far more complex process than simple stamping of a coin, particularly around purity and accurate weight control.
If you dig deep, you will find that many of the coin supply problems come from underestimation of demand and the resulting exhausting of blank inventories. Often, blank suppliers are mints themselves and can face conflicts where they earn more by prioritising blanks for internal use rather than supply externally. Running higher blank inventories is often not an option, due to the cost of funding the high dollar value of the inventory.
The Rest…HERE
