China may have bought another 15 tons of gold

China's central bank is likely to have added 15 tonnes of gold to its reserves in the month of September, according to reports Bloomberg. That's what the latter suggest Figures that the State Administration of Foreign Exchange released earlier this week.

Although the value of China's gold reserves fell from $61.8 billion to $61.2 billion in September, the gold price also fell somewhat in the same period. And now that China is appreciating the value of its gold reserves every month, we can make a simple calculation. If we convert the amounts with the gold price at the end of August and the end of September, we arrive at an increase in the total gold stock of about 15 tonnes. This brings the total gold reserves of the Chinese central bank to 1,709 tonnes.

China buys gold

Since July, the Chinese central bank has been providing a monthly overview of total currency and gold reserves, in accordance with the IMF's accounting rules. This confirmed the suspicion that China is buying gold as a form of diversification. In July, it became clear that China has bought a total of more than 600 tons of gold over the past six years. But the Chinese have also continued to buy gold in recent months.

In the month of July, 19 tons and in August there was another 16 tons added to the vault. Like Russia and Kazakhstan, China adds a substantial amount of precious metal to its reserves almost every month.

Foreign exchange reserves

China has relatively little gold in its vault relative to its currency reserves, only 1.7%. In many Western countries, the percentage of gold on the balance sheet is much larger. The fact that the percentage is so low is mainly due to the enormous size of China's foreign exchange reserves. They were worth $3.5 trillion at the end of September. China's foreign exchange reserve peaked in 2014 at a level of about $4 trillion, after which the country began to dollar reserves to sell.