Transcription
This Friday, July 24th, the biggest banks in China are shutting down paper gold trading for their retail customers. ICBC, the largest bank on Earth, the Postal Savings Bank of China, Pingan, China, Guang Fa, all of them ending the same products in the same window of time. Bank of China and Citic didn't just shut it down. They raised margin requirements to 140%, which is a very polite way of doing the same thing.
Now, the official story is that this protects everyday people from gold's volatility. And look, yes, gold has been wild. It hit 5,600 an ounce in January. Today, it's sitting around 4,000. It's a 28% dip. It has not been fun. But I don't buy the official story for a second. I think July 24th is the day China finally starts finding out what gold is actually worth. Because here's the thing, the price of gold you see quoted on your screen every day is not the real price. And today, I'm going to show you why.
I'm going to take you back to the last time governments defended a fake gold price. It ended with military planes full of gold bars and a collapsed floor inside the Bank of England. I'm going to show you the machine China spent a decade building to force the real price out into the open. And then at the end, I'm going to tell you exactly what I'm doing with my own money, plus the two signals that tell you this whole thesis is playing out. Stick around for that. Also, make sure to subscribe to the channel, 'cause this story is not ending on Friday. It is starting on Friday. I'm going to do my best to keep you ahead of it the whole way through.
Now, let me break this down. So, after World War II, the world ran on a very simple promise. The US dollar was the world's money, and any government holding dollars could trade them in for gold at $35 an ounce. That was a fixed, forever price. There was just one problem. Washington can't stop spending. It kept printing new dollars to fund wars, social programs, running the world. And the amount of gold didn't grow with them. Any foreign government could do the math. If the number of dollars doubles and the gold doesn't, well, each dollar is worth half as much gold as was promised. So, the sticker still said $35, but everyone could see the real number was higher. So, what do you do? Well, you do exactly what they did. You hand over the paper, take the metal, say, "Thank you very much."
By 1961, the US and seven European allies formed the London Gold Pool, specifically designed to defend the price of gold. So whenever gold pushed above $35, they sold their own gold into the market to hammer it back down. This is how corrupt governments are. They were selling the most valuable thing they owned to protect a piece of paper. Then France did the math, quietly walked out, and started swapping dollars for bullion. The run was on. Between 1958 and 1968, the United States lost around 8,000 tons of gold. Its reserves fell from around 20,000 tons to about 12,000. And in the final days, it turned into a full-blown panic. In just four days, in March of 1968, roughly 780 tons of gold got dumped on the market trying to hold down the price. US military aircraft were flying gold into England, where it was trucked in convoys to the back door of the Bank of England. At one point, there was so much gold stacked up that the floor of the bank's weighing room physically collapsed under the weight. And on March 14th, Washington asked London to shut down the gold market. The Queen declared an emergency bank holiday. When it reopened, the governments gave up. From that day forward, there were two prices for gold. The official $35 that governments use with each other and the free market price, which jumped past $40 immediately and has never looked back. Three years later, Nixon cut the dollar loose from gold completely. And within a decade, gold touched $850. So, here's the lesson. It's the whole video in one sentence. When a paper price and the real metal disagree, the metal wins every time.
Now, to see what China is doing, you need to understand what paper gold is. And it's simpler than it sounds. When most people buy gold today, no gold moves anywhere. A bank or an exchange sells you a contract that says you own an ounce, and the bar supposedly sits in somebody else's vault. Most buyers never ask for the bar. They don't want to store it. They don't want to insure it or guard it. They just want to sell the contract later for more than what they paid. And the sellers know that. Which means nothing stops them from selling claims on the same ounce two times, five times, 10 times. The only moment that fails is the moment everybody asks for their metal at once. And everybody never does.
Now ask the important question. What does that do to the price? It is a game of supply and demand. But the supply setting the price isn't the metal, it's the contracts. If there are 10 paper claims floating around for every real ounce, the market sees 10 times more gold than actually exists, more supply, lower price. That simple. And here's the part that should really bother you. Nobody. Nobody can tell you the true ratio of paper claims to real bars in London and New York, where the world's gold price gets set. The most important price in the world is set by a market. They can't tell you how much of the thing it actually has. Does this sound familiar? An official price on paper, a different reality in the vault. It's 1968 all over again.
In a minute, I'm going to show you the three-part machine built to force the real number out and the two signals that tell you it's working. But first, if you like this kind of content, if you want to take your investing to the next level, I encourage you to join my Black Ops trading service. For just $5, you get an entire year of access. Live one-hour mentoring sessions with me every Monday. They're interactive. We'll look at uh our leading stocks, what we're doing with gold, gold miners. We'll review your stocks. Nothing is off limits every week for a year, plus another session with my analyst every Thursday, proprietary indicators, my weekly newsletter. Tons of stuff there. Just five bucks for the whole year. So, click the link in the description, scan the QR code, or just go to tradewithross.com to get started.
All right. If the paper price really is being held down, you would expect the smartest, the best-connected money on earth to be doing two things. Quietly getting rid of paper promises and quietly stacking real gold, real metal. So, is anyone doing that? Yeah. Central banks bought 244 tons of gold in the first quarter of this year. The fastest pace of buying in over a year. And the World Gold Council will tell you that a meaningful chunk of central bank buying never even gets officially reported. So, they buy it, they just don't declare it. And what are they selling to pay for it? US Treasuries, the paper promises of the most powerful government on earth. This year, gold officially passed US Treasuries [snorts] as the largest reserve asset held by the world's central banks. Folks, you don't need to read into this. The institutions that run the whole financial system are dumping their US bonds and they are buying physical gold. They know the quoted price is being suppressed, that the actual value is much higher and it will soon be reflected.
And folks, we've already seen the paper system crack once this year. Back in January, the silver market broke. The spread between paper silver and physical delivery blew out to four times the historical norm. Lease rates spiked. Dealers were charging big premiums to buy a real bar. Same metal, same day, two different prices, one for the paper, one for the thing itself. And you probably experienced this. You logged onto your computer. Gold's $5,000 an ounce. You go to buy an ounce of gold at a dealer and they want 5,500, 5,800. That's what we're talking about here. And it's the exact same warning light from 1968 playing out today, five and a half decades later.
Which brings us back to those Chinese banks. Because what starts Friday is not a ban on gold. Chinese citizens can buy all the physical gold they want. What ends is the leveraged paper, the contracts, the margin products, the promises. And look at what it's being replaced with. Three parts.
Part one, Shanghai. The Shanghai Gold Exchange settles in physical metal. So when a trade clears, a real bar has to move from the seller's vault to the buyer's vault. You can't sell 10 claims on one bar because sooner or later a bar has to show up. A market built that way can only measure two things. How much real metal exists and how badly people want it. That, my friend, is called price discovery.
Part two is Hong Kong. China's currency rules make Shanghai hard for foreigners to trade directly. So, Hong Kong is being built out as the front door where the rest of the world can buy and sell at a physically settled price.
And part three tells you everything. The gold vault at Hong Kong's international airport is being expanded from 150 tons of capacity to 1,000 tons. It's going to hold 2.2 million pounds of the stuff. It's going to be seven times bigger. All built in advance. Folks, a paper market doesn't need vaults. Contracts don't take up shelf space. You build storage for a thousand tons of gold for one reason. You're expecting a thousand tons of real gold to arrive.
And they told us this was coming. Back in 2014, the head of the Shanghai Gold Exchange stood up at a conference in London, of all places, and said it out loud. "Gold is consumed in the East but priced in the West." And when China gains influence in the gold market, the real price gets revealed. That was 12 years ago. The vaults are going up. The paper gets shut off Friday. In 1968, the run on gold was an accident. This one is being built on purpose.
Now, let me connect this to your actual life because a suppressed gold price sounds like it's a problem for traders. It's not. It's the story of the last 50 years. And I can show it to you with a house. In 1976, the median new house in America cost about $44,000. At the time, gold traded at $125 an ounce. So that house cost roughly 350 ounces of gold. Today, the median new home cost $422,500. Nearly 10 times as many dollars, but priced in gold, about 105 oz. So in dollars, the house got 10 times more expensive. In gold, it got 70% cheaper. Houses didn't go up, folks. The dollar went down. Gold just stood there holding its value while the paper in your wallet bled out. And here's the kicker. Every bit of that math was done using the paper gold price. If that price really is suppressed, then gold has protected purchasing power even better than those numbers show.
So, where do I stand? Well, for the record, I own physical gold and I plan to buy a lot more. I also own gold miners in my retirement account. And if this pricing plays out the way I think it does, gold is likely to end the decade dramatically higher than the number on your screen today.
Now, let's just look at a quick chart of gold. This is just a daily chart. And obviously, we saw the big run-up in late 2025 all the way up here to around $5,600 an ounce and it has pulled back since then. Now again, pricing gold in dollars has plenty of caveats to it, but just for fun, here's where I am. I am liking to buy gold and I talk a lot about supply and demand because I think that's all the market is. It is supply, it is demand. Where are their buyers and sellers? So what you typically see is these runs higher followed by consolidation where buyers and sellers are somewhat at agreement, followed by new price discovery, consolidation, new price discovery, consolidation, new price discovery, and then it's reversed back. But what you'll typically find is that these areas of previous price acceptance will act as magnets in pullbacks because that is a place where buyers and sellers are once in agreement and likely to come back. So this pullback here to 4,000 to me is a great buying opportunity. If it breaks through, I will be loading the boat in this 32, 33, $3400 level. And if it gets down here to 26, 2700, I'm taking a second mortgage on the house and I'm going about as long in gold as I could possibly get. Okay?
So, I can't promise you July 24th is the day everything instantly changes. Markets don't move on our schedule. They don't move instantly. But if this thesis is right, which it is, you're going to see two things happen. And you don't need me to see them. You can watch them yourself.
Signal number one, a gap will open between the paper price of gold and the price of real physical metal. The same gap that showed up in silver back in January. I was buying from AppMax. I remember vividly, they were marking up silver 20, 25% above spot.
Signal number two, central banks keep swapping Treasuries for gold quarter after quarter, year after year, no matter what the price does. Those two signals keep flashing. Odds are we will all look back and wish we bought a heck of a lot more gold when it could be had for three or $4,000 fiat dollars an ounce.
Folks, if you got value out of this video, do me a favor, leave a comment down below or uh be sure to subscribe to the channel. And look, if you've got a friend in the market, send this to them. I wish more people knew the reality of what's going on with gold as it pertains to your money. And don't forget to join my Black Ops trading service. It is just five bucks for the whole year. Live group mentoring, interactive with me every week for a year, my weekly newsletter, bonus reports, indicators, tons of stuff, just five bucks. So, click the link in the description, scan the QR code, go to tradewithross.com to get signed up, and I'll see you in the next.