Yi Gang, Vice Governor of the People's Bank of China (PBOC), recently made the headlines with his comments on Chinese gold reserves. On Wednesday, Mr. Yi stated that China's gold reserves remain static at 1,054 tonnes, and suggested that a sizeable increase in those reserves would be unlikely in the future. "We need to take into account both the stability of the market and gold prices," Mr. Yi stated, adding that as the world's largest gold producer and importer, China produces about 400 tonnes of gold annually, and imports an additional 500 to 600 tonnes of gold every year. "Compared with China's 3.3-trillion-U.S.-dollar foreign exchange reserves, the size of the gold market is too small," Yi said, rejecting speculation that China would further diversify its foreign reserve investments into the precious metal. "If the Chinese government were to buy too much gold, gold prices would surge, a scenario that will hurt Chinese consumers ... We can only invest about 1-2 percent of the foreign exchange reserves into gold because the market is too small," Yi stated.
On October 2, 2012, news hit that Barry Zubrow, JPM's Chief Risk Officer from November 2007 to January 2012 (in other words, key supervisor of the risk onboarded by the CIO, aka JPM's prop trading desk, for the biggest part of its existence), and then briefly head of corporate and regulatory affairs, would retire from JPMorgan. As Bloomberg reported then, "Now is the right time in my life" to retire, Zubrow, 59, wrote to colleagues in a note today. "We have learned from the mistakes of our recent trading losses."
