Germany’s Budding Love Affair with Gold

We talk a lot about India’s love affair with gold. The Asian nation ranks as the second largest gold consumer in the world, behind only China. Gold is intimately intertwined with Indian cultural and marriage rights, and it serves as a vital cog in India’s economy, both above ground and underground. But the yellow metal has a new lover vying for its attention.
Germany.
Over the last 10 years, gold investment has boomed in Deutschland, according to a report by the World Gold Council. Last year alone, Germans poured 6.8 billion ($8 billion) into gold investment products, with 22% of German investors buying goldover the past 12 months. Over the last 10 years, Germany has established itself as a 100 ton-plus per year market for gold bars and coins. The WGC calls the growth in the German gold market a ‘radical transformation.’
Before 2008 it was small. Bar and coin demand languished at low levels: average demand between 1995 and 2007 was a modest 17 tons and, in
some years, there were more sellers than buyers … Since then, the German gold investment market has flourished. Germany has established itself as a 100t-plus per year market for bars and coins, and a vibrant domestic ETC market has developed: during Q3 2017, German-listed ETC AUM hit an all-time high of 252.1 tons, equivalent to 9.8 billion.’

This post was published at Schiffgold on OCTOBER 11, 2017.