For more than a year, China’s central bank has been buying up large amounts of gold. The move, along with the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, have helped spike the price of the precious metal to new highs.
The price of gold broke the $2,300 (€2,212) level for the first time this week as geopolitical issues, expectations of US interest rate cuts and China’s accumulation of the precious metal spurred interest from speculators.
Gold is seen by investors as a safe haven in times of turmoil and a hedge against currency devaluation, so the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine have helped the recent price rise, along with the post-COVID inflation spike.
The move by China’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China (PBC), has been mirrored by other mostly emerging market central banks, who are all keen to up their gold holdings.
DW takes a look at why Beijing has gone on a gold-buying spree.
You must log in or register to comment.
Probably a war chest to help weather sanctions if/when they invade Taiwan
It’s exactly what Russia did in the lead up to full invasion of Ukraine. Hard to sanction a currency you can melt and reshape easily.
The US has been ramping up its trade war against China, which it has been waging ever since China promoted its Made in China 2025 plan. The US will leverage its dominant reserve currency status, among other powers, to stave off China from taking the top world economy spot. This move looks like one countermeasure that China is taking.
I’m pretty sure project 2025 also has a plan to make American money backed by gold again
A part of myself I am not proud of, the part that slows down by car accidents rubbernecking hoping to see blood, kinda wants to see them implement 2025.
Can you imagine the delicious chaos of it? The day the stock market collapses and people whose only qualifications are fifteen years experience doing conservative talk radio are trying to figure out how to economy. Issuing random statements about how they woke forces are causing the currency collapse.
The entire world is run by unimaginative experts. Keeping systems going based only on what has worked before. Which is fine. You didn’t invent shoes, you wear them because everyone else was. The shoemaking company that made them didn’t invent them either. They just run the factories.
They want to change that. They want an ideological driven system instead of an expert system. And every single time without exception in human history this was tried. Every time when ideological purity determined rank instead of rank climbing semi-meritocracy things went to hell. This time would be even worse because our society is a lot more complicated than say 1919 Russia.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Gold is seen by investors as a safe haven in times of turmoil and a hedge against currency devaluation, so the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine have helped the recent price rise, along with the post-COVID inflation spike.
As well as the PBC, Chinese consumers have been buying gold coins, bars and jewelry, after their real estate investments, the yuan currency and the country’s stock market dropped in value due to recent economic woes in the world’s second-largest economy.
BRICS nations, including China, are concerned about how Washington weaponizes the dollar to preserve its global economic and geopolitical position.
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the US and European Union imposed several rounds of sanctions on Moscow, including freezing the Russian central bank’s foreign reserves.
Chinese leaders are worried that the country could face similar US curbs if it decided to further flex its military muscles or if the trade war with Washington worsened.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has said that his country could retake Taiwan, a democratically run island Bejing considers its own territory, by force if necessary.
The original article contains 753 words, the summary contains 173 words. Saved 77%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Removed by mod
They are making their own BRICS currency again the US Dollars. That’s why they are buying gold.
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. The article goes over how it plans to counter the trade war with the US and potential economic sanctions. There has been talk in the past of a gold-back yuan. Not exactly a BRICS combined currency, but would likely be used by BRICS countries in competition with the US dollar.
Common people realize inflation is underreported and are trying to prepare for the market correction.
The article is talking about the central bank
