As gold became increasingly financialized in recent years - through futures, ETFs, derivatives and so on - and as the impact of "financialized" gold became the dominant price-setting factor in a world where the nominal volume of "paper gold" traded is now orders of magnitude greater than "physical", a bizarre decoupling emerges every time there is a major market stress event. A pattern that has emerged is that during periods of "bathwater" liquidation, when levered asset managers are forced to dump paper gold to cover margin calls in different parts of their book, sending the price of gold sharply lower also happens to be when physical gold buyers step up amid concerns over the viability of either the financial system and/or the reserve currency.

The result, as discussed last week, is that "the price of physical gold decouples from paper gold" resulting in an arbitrage that physical gold buyers, i.e., those who don't have faith in gold ETFs such as the GDX or simply prefer to have possession of the metal, find especially delightful as it allows them to buy physical gold at lower prices than they would ordinarily have access to.

The immediate next step is a surge in demand for physical gold that results in precious metal vendors and exchanges becoming sold out in very short notices. Take for example the largest US precious metals exchange, APMEX, where any attempt to buy gold in size, or rather weight (because the truly rich who need to park several millions can't be bothered with individual gold coins and instead go for the 400 oz brick or 1 kilo bar), finds, well, nothing because everything is sold out, and not just for bars...