A lease is a contract where an asset is rent to someone else. As odd as it sounds, gold is also leased. Why? Well, on the one hand, some entities own gold they need to put to work, e.g. the bullion banks that hold a metal as a debt to their customers, so they can lease it out to earn money. On the other hand, there are companies in the gold industry who, for some reasons, prefer to borrow the metal instead of buying it outright. For example, there might be a gold mining company which expects to have one thousand ounces of gold from its production. However, the metal will be ready to sell in the market not earlier than before one month, since it must be refined etc. The company, however, still needs to pay its employees and cover other expenses on an ongoing basis. Therefore, it might borrow gold for one month from the bullion bank, sell it for cash and pay its bills, and then give the produced and refined gold back to the bank. Since the gold lease rate (GLR), i.e. the interest rate for borrowing gold, is usually lower than the U.S. dollar interest rates, it makes sense to borrow gold rather than greenbacks (at least for companies who can easily sell gold or use it in their production processes).