After staying up all night in London to watch the EU referendum results, and mourning the outcome, Lauro Franzese decided to make some money.
“I thought I might as well get something out of it,” the 61-year-old army veteran said as he walked the streets of the city’s Hatton Gardens jewelry district. “So I sold gold today — at about 30 percent profit.”
Franzese, who unloaded a ring he had owned for a decade, as well as several coins, took advantage of the biggest-ever one-day gain for gold that is denominated in pounds. As the British currency sank to the lowest level in three decades, gold rose a record 14 percent to ￡966.14 (US$1,322).
In a shop next to the Savoy Hotel, dealers said they had never seen anything like it. Some Londoners were rushing to sell, many more to buy.
“Anybody who’s got a spare pound to put into gold is doing it,” said Michael Cooper, commercial director of ATS Bullion Ltd. “We’re doing 10 times the business we normally do.”
In the fallout from Britain’s decision to leave the EU, the unexpected resignation of the prime minister and uncertainty over the nation’s economic future, investors looked for safety and found it in gold — a precious metal long prized as a universal store of value immune to the whims of political leaders.
The Royal Mint, which makes circulation and collector coins, and specialist online brokers reported surges in new customers. The Mint saw a “significant spike” in buying, with account openings up 200 percent since Thursday.
“We’re going to be inundated,” said Cooper of ATS, which traces its history to the 1600s. “We’re buying pretty much everything we can from the refiners. They’re not going to get enough in to fill all the orders.”
In London’s spot gold market, the biggest in the world, prices jumped as much as 8.1 percent, the most since the height of the global financial crisis in 2008. The metal later pared gains, trading near a two-year high of US$1,316 an ounce.
CoinInvest.com said a record number of UK visitors flooded the Web site at about 5:30am on Friday.
Gold Britannia coins, which bear the image of the armed Roman goddess, and Sovereigns were the best sellers, said Daniel Marburger, a director at the Frankfurt-based retailer.
BullionVault, an online trading and vaulting service, saw its busiest day ever. Customers exchanged ￡25.8 million in metal by 2pm on Friday, more than two weeks worth of average trading last year, according to a statement from Adrian Ash, head of research at the London-based firm.
Some people, like Franzese, took advantage of the jump in prices. Baird & Co, a precious metals dealer in London, transferred staff from other parts of the company to answer phones and meet demand.
“People in Britain who bought in January are now seeing prices ￡200 above where they bought,” said Tony Dobra, an executive director at the firm. “They’re cashing in.”
No such luck for Ruth Smith, a 48-year-old financial services professional.
“The size of my diamond engagement ring has got smaller now thanks to Brexit” and the pound’s sharp decline in value, she said. “I had been waiting for two months to cash in on my investments and replace my current fake ring that cost ￡4 with a proper three-carat ring after the vote — but now all our plans have gone down the drain with the [US] dollar-price effect.”
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Micron Technology Inc is a driving force pushing the US Congress to pass legislation that would put new export restrictions on equipment its Chinese competitors use to make their chips, according to people familiar with the matter. A US House of Representatives panel yesterday was to vote on the “MATCH Act,” a bill designed to close gaps in restrictions on chipmaking equipment. It would also pressure foreign companies that sell equipment to Chinese chipmaking facilities to align with export curbs on US companies like Lam Research Corp and Applied Materials Inc. The bill targets facilities operated by China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies Inc
Singapore-based ride-hailing and delivery giant Grab Holdings’ planned acquisition of Foodpanda’s Taiwan operations has yet to enter the formal review stage, as regulators await supplementary documents, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said yesterday. Acting FTC Chairman Chen Chih-min (陳志民) told the legislature’s Economics Committee that although Grab submitted its application on March 27, the case has not been officially accepted because required materials remain incomplete. Once the filing is finalized, the FTC would launch a formal probe into the deal, focusing on issues such as cross-shareholding and potential restrictions on market competition, Chen told lawmakers. Grab last month announced that it would acquire
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
RSS