OFor years now, gold buyers have been making public opinion talk about their controversial existence. Their rise, evident to the point of almost seeming unstoppable in the midst of the economic crisis, has begun to deflate in recent years, to the point of turning into a real decline.
The statistics themselves clarify the picture: if in 2013 there were 35 thousand gold buyers scattered throughout the country with particular reference to the large cities, above all I buy gold in Rome, Milan, Turin, Naples, today there are about 15 thousand less. They are provided by the National Association for the Protection of the Gold Sector, which has also been thinking about the causes of this crisis for some time.
The drop in prices
The first reason indicated by experts for the crisis in the sector is to be found in the sharp drop in the metal's prices on the international market. Just think about how in the space of just one year gold has recorded a drop in price of 30%, equal to about 14 euros. In a sector that lives and thrives above all on prices, this is a very serious contraction, which has contributed significantly to impacting the number of gold buyers in operation along the peninsula.
The other reasons for the crisis
If gold prices have had a certain weight in the skimming of gold buyers, it would be reductive to say that the crisis in which the sector finds itself is due only to them. Indeed, there are many observers who point out that the crisis had begun well before the yellow metal recorded such a sharp fall in its prices.
In particular, the same insiders point out how the evolution of the economic crisis following the bursting of the subprime mortgage bubble, which pushed many families to sell off their gold, paved the way for the contraction of business, due to lack of raw material. Simply put, families hit hard by the mix of crisis and austerity quickly exhausted their reserves of precious metal. A fact made even more evident by the fact that while gold buyers located in working-class neighborhoods were closing, new ones were opening in residential areas.
Anti-money laundering rules
Finally, it is also important to remember that precisely to respond to the alarms raised at the beginning of the phenomenon, when many gold buyers were used as a tool for laundering dirty money, measures were launched aimed at clarifying the situation also on a regulatory level. The tip of the iceberg in this sense can be considered the bill 237, as a result of which operators in the sector are equated to professional ones and an increasingly precise set of anti-money laundering regulations is launched. A framework that, however, has frightened many operators, who have preferred to close, leaving the field to those who intend to take up the challenge by focusing increasingly on professionalism and entrepreneurial ability.
Article published on November 27, 2018 - 08:45
