From the World Gold Council’s website on Tuesday:
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie to launch gold jewellery range
Monday, 16th November 2009 (145 views) Luxury jeweller Asprey is teaming up with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie to launch a new range of gold and other jewellery and accessories. According to Women’s Wear Daily, the couple have designed a collection of items entitled The Protector, with each piece based on a serpentine style. Rings, pendants, earrings and men’s cufflinks form part of the range alongside baby gifts such as eggcups, spoons, photo frames and tooth boxes.
The snake-based design of each piece came about because Jolie received a serpent-shaped ring when pregnant with daughter Shiloh and has considered the snake to be a protective talisman ever since. All of the net profits from sales of the range will be donated to the Education Partnership for Children of Conflict, which aims to help educate children who have been victims of war, conflicts and natural disasters. The collection will go on sale at Asprey stores in London, Beverly Hills, New York, Tokyo and Dubai later this month. Asprey was founded in 1781 and is based in London.
Ah — so this is what Ms. Jolie does with her time when she’s not trudging around the world drawing attention to humanitarian issues.
Well, good for her (and Brad) we say, at least they have timed things well if they’re trying to cash-in on gold and precious metals mania.
In keeping with Brangelina’s humanitarian focus, the proceeds from the jewelry sales will of course go to Jolie’s co-founded charity, Education Partnership for Children of Conflict. The Times of India, which — given India’s love of golden jewelry — was unsurprisingly all over the story on Tuesday, reported prices would start at $525 a piece.
As for timing, Brangelina reportedly began work on the project over a year ago. Which means, if Asprey sourced much of the precious metals back then, Angelina’s good causes might be in for somewhat of a windfall.
On Tuesday gold was still sticking firmly above the $1130 per troy ounce mark, having hit an intraday high of $1140.85 according to Reuters data:
Meanwhile, in other gold-supportive developments, the International Monetary Fund confirmed that the tiny tax-haven state of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean bought 2 tonnes of IMF gold on November 11 for $71.1m.
Mauritius follows India, which was the first nation to announce the purchase of a slice of the IMF’s latest 400-tonne gold offer.
All of which ties in well with the World Gold Council’s recent survey, which concluded central banks would become net buyers of gold “over time”. GFMS, Blackrock and Goldman Sachs have all said much the same thing in recent months.
Going back to India’s purchase, meanwhile, we speculated to what degree the IMF’s balloon $250bn SDR issue might have influenced the move. And while it now turns out, India did not use its actual SDR allocation per se to pay for the gold (according to its latest reserve statistics) — whether India took the money from alternative FX reserves or SDRs does not change the fact that the SDR issuance may have facilitated the move by lifting the country’s reserves overall.
Just to illustrate the point, here are some charts we mocked up of recent national gold purchases — at the average price of $1000 per ounce — versus respective countries’ SDR issuances at today’s SDR value of $1.6 per SDR. We’re not saying that one unequivocally accounts for the other — correlation does not equal causation etc. — but when an IMF global monetary drop is followed by an immediate announcement of gold sales, it might be sensible to consider a connection.
The China data, by the way, is based on estimates of general Chinese gold purchases by Goldman Sachs, while the Sri Lanka data is based on an estimate provided by an AFP source.
Of course, perhaps there’s nothing to it.
Related links:
The gold for SDR swap confirmed! – FT Alphaville
IMF sells 200 tonnes of gold to India central bank - FT
The SDR effect on the dollar, and gold – FT Alphaville