Whenever there's kerfuffle in macroland, Tether seems to be involved. The dollar is crashing and gold is rushing and bitcoin is confused (#1420812)

There are roughly 370,000 nuclear bunkers in Switzerland, a legacy of the Cold War that are now rarely used. One of them, though, is a hive of activity. Every week, more than a ton of gold is hauled in to the high-security vault, owned by crypto giant Tether Holdings SA, which is now the world’s largest known hoard of bullion outside of banks and nation states.

So far, however, Tether’s gold bet has been spectacularly successful. Its buying has coincided with the market’s biggest rally since the 1970s, as investors and governments fret about holding dollars.

It's not retail or central banks driving the gold price, it's Paolo Ardoino (?!), Tether itself being:

"the embodiment of a meeting of the crypto and gold worlds whose shared distrust of government debt is a major factor behind the surge in prices to never-before-seen highs above $5,200 an ounce.""the embodiment of a meeting of the crypto and gold worlds whose shared distrust of government debt is a major factor behind the surge in prices to never-before-seen highs above $5,200 an ounce."

OK, how is that an appro commentary when the journo-author's name is "Jack Ryan"? (of Tom Clancy fame...)

It has rapidly stepped up its purchases, buying over 70 tons of gold over the course of last year for its reserves and its own gold stablecoin, according to a Bloomberg calculation. That’s more than was reported by almost any single central bank: only Poland, which added 102 tons to its reserves, made larger declared purchases.

(quick calculation, I'm getting double-digit billions here)

...It is also more than was bought by any but the three largest exchange-traded funds, which represent the collective activity of tens of thousands of individual traders and investors.

TOLD YAH!

...OK, fine, they're small fish:

Still, Tether is only a small part of a much larger rush from investors into gold, with central banks and ETF investors collectively buying more than 1,500 tons of metal.

Tether

...purchases both directly from refiners in Switzerland, and from the biggest financial institutions in the market, Ardoino said, and a big order of metal can take months to arrive.
The company is exploring how to make its process of buying gold more efficient, he said, “because one to two tons per week is a very sizable amount.”

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