The answer is the University of Texas Investment Management company.
Via bullion brokers Goldcore’s daily note on Monday:
$1 Billion of Gold Bars Taken Delivery of by Pension Fund Due to Risk of COMEX Default and Shortages
Although the dispatch is actually based on the following story from Bloomberg:
April 16 (Bloomberg) — The University of Texas Investment Management Co., the second-largest U.S. academic endowment, took delivery of almost $1 billion in gold bullion and is storing the bars in a New York vault, according to the fund’s board.
The fund, whose $19.9 billion in assets ranked it behind Harvard University’s endowment as of August, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers, added about $500 million in gold investments to an existing stake last year, said Bruce Zimmerman, the endowment’s chief executive officer.
—–The decision to turn the fund’s investment into gold bars was influenced by Kyle Bass, a Dallas hedge fund manager and member of the endowment’s board, Zimmerman said at its annual meeting on April 14. Bass made $500 million on the U.S. subprime-mortgage collapse.
Goldcore’s perspective is (of course) that this sort of trend — transferring money from the gold derivatives market into physical bullion — is likely to get more pronounced as central banks continue to QEase, while exchanges continue to hold limited bullion reserves to back their derivatives obligations.
As the brokers note:
The risk of a COMEX default increases by the day and appears to be moving from the realms of a “conspiracy theory” to that of “of course we knew it would happen, it stands to reason and was inevitable”. A COMEX default would have serious ramifications for the dollar and all fiat currencies as it would further erode trust in central banks, fiat currencies and today’s monetary system.
All we would say is that combined total bullion inventories at the Comex currently stand at about the same level they were at last August — some 11,083,607 troy ounces — versus relatively similar open interest levels too.
That is to say, the inventory situation hasn’t really got markedly worse.
Related links:
The Comex gold inventory jigsaw - FT Alphaville
Is someone liquidating GLD? - FT Alphaville
A CDO-esque gold investment - FT Alphaville
Conspiracies and a lack of contango in silver – FT Alphaville