Physical Gold - Why?
Why does BullionVault make sure you
get outright physical ownership of gold? After all, it would be so much
easier to offer you a gold account.
The reason is risk of default. One
of the patterns which recurs throughout history is that growing
financial sophistication leads to widespread expansion of credit and
exposure to default, and few people successfully avoid it when it
matters.
Banks, pension savings, mortgage
guarantors and all the major financial institutions on which we depend
are now tied up in a web of undelivered assets. A is the registered
owner of a bond payable by B, the principal on which has been
credit-swapped out to C. The terms are controlled by a deed drafted by
an investment bank D, which itself receives the interest, which has
been aggregated with 30 others and sold notionally to E. E is foreign,
and flattens the FX risk with a bank F, who sells and rolls a future on
his long currency book, which is bought by another bank for an assured
profit by running the position against a higher yield bond bought from
a junk-status borrowing customer, which has been insured against the
risk of default with G, a major insurer, who happens also to be A.
These are the styles of relationship
which dominate the world in which ordinary peoples' savings are bound
up, and they are profitable in the short term. This is why financial
rather than commercial companies increasingly dominate the list of the
top companies in America and Europe. They find it easier to make
profits by providing credit and assuming eventual repayment, rather
than by actually demanding settlement; a habit which could put off no
end of potential customers.
All our common savings products are
bound up in these webs. At BullionVault we do not know when and where
these webs will break, and, with the greatest possible respect, we
don't think you do either. But it is so certain that they will break,
and at an unexpected place and time, that we believe every forward
thinking person with a respectable private reserve would do well to opt
out with at least part of their savings.
A purchase of gold is a good way to
do this. But gold accounts, indexes, spread bets, and futures all fail
to extricate the buyer from the web of dependencies, because they are
based on undelivered gold. The only way to opt out of the web is to own
physical property outright.
This is why BullionVault has
concentrated on being the best way in the world to do just that.
Regards,
Paul Tustain
Director, Bullion Vault