China's Gilded Gold Market

At 350 tons per year, China is the world's largest producer of gold. And yet China's statistics show that the country has been a net gold importer since the 1990s. Gold imports and exports have been tightly controlled by the People's Bank of China, though new avenues for investment have emerged in recent years.

Marcus Grubb, the managing director of investment research and marketing for the World Gold Council (WGC), in June said that the world gold price had yet to fully internalize the additional demand that China's investors and consumers were bringing to the table. At the time, the WGC had just published figures that showed China's demand for gold surpassing that of India for the first time. This has led many to ask where China's gold market is headed next and to wonder how China's expanding gold imports might apply upward pressure to global gold prices.