Gold breaks $4,550 in Beijing and adds $47.96 more by New York

§1A round number, broken twice.

Spot gold broke through $4,550 an ounce during Friday's Beijing afternoon and kept going after China went home. Eastmoney, timestamped 14:51 on 21 August, put the metal at $4,554.441 an ounce, up 0.8%, with COMEX futures at $4,598.4, up 0.59%. The drivers it names are the US Treasury's expansion of its liquidity-support repurchase operations from $20 billion to $40 billion, falling long-end Treasury yields, a weaker dollar, a repricing of fiscal risk, and visible policy disagreement inside the Federal Reserve, with US federal debt passing $40 trillion sitting underneath all of it. This paper's own mark of record for the same session, taken from Kitco's board and re-read at press time this morning, is $4,602.40. Saturday is not a trading day and there is no fresher number in existence.

The two figures are the same rally at different hours, and the distance between them is the story. Beijing's 14:51 is 02:51 in New York, roughly ten hours before Friday's last print. Gold was at $4,554.44 when the Chinese wire wrote it up and $4,602.40 when the New York board stopped moving: $47.96 higher, a further 1.05%, this desk's arithmetic on the two published readings. Against this paper's 21 August mark of record, Friday's close is up $20.80 or 0.45%. Silver went the other way, down $0.45 or 0.65% to $68.86, which widens the gold-to-silver ratio to 66.84 from 66.10, this desk's division of its own two marks. Platinum and palladium are held at $1,881.00 and $1,336.00 because Kitco and TradingEconomics sit $18.70 and $19.50 apart on them, gaps of 1.00% and 1.47%, and a mark no second page corroborates is not written.

§2What the Chinese counter did with it.

The Chinese retail counter is where the rally is landing hardest. Eastmoney carries Chow Sang Sang's pure gold jewellery at 1,365 yuan a gram, up 6 yuan after a 46-yuan jump the day before, 52 yuan across two sessions. This paper reported the same counter at 1,285 yuan a gram on 8 August, alongside Chow Tai Fook at 1,286 and four other brands within five yuan of both. That is 80 yuan a gram, or 6.23%, added in thirteen days, on this desk's comparison of its own published record against Friday's quotation. What was described here two weeks ago as a collectively held floor moving on its own schedule has moved again, and it has moved with the metal rather than lagging it, which is not what these counters did through most of the past year.

§3The Gulf leg, and what one rate looks like.

The Gulf leg of the same session is thinner evidence and is labelled as such. Ghorba News, dated in its own text to Friday 21 August, carries UAE retail gold at 538.46 dirhams a gram for 24 karat, 493.59 for 22, 471.15 for 21 and 403.84 for 18, all four above Thursday's close. No second dated Gulf source was found for those figures, so they are single-source and are not promoted past that. One thing can be said about them without a second source: the four numbers are one rate and three multiplications. Divide each by the 24-karat figure and the results are 0.9167, 0.8750 and 0.7500 to four decimals, the exact fineness ratios, so this is a single struck rate stepped down by purity rather than four independently quoted markets. At the dirham's pegged 3.6725 to the dollar the 24-karat rate converts to $146.62 a gram, against $147.97 a gram derived from this paper's own mark of record, a difference of $1.35 explained by the hours between them.