Gold reserves are viewed as being crucial to actually putting in a real value that aims to support a nation’s currency. The decline in the price of gold has gotten even worse since the end of June, but five central banks were buyers of gold in the first half of 2015.

New data released by the World Gold Council (WGC) shows central bank purchases and holdings for the month of August.   Five nations that added handily to their gold reserves in the first half of 2015. These were China and Russia for the lion’s share, followed by Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Jordan. Turkey had been classified as a net-adder of gold previously due to reserves for its bank sector, but it has been decreasing net gold holdings in 2015.

 China has been trying to curb a stock market meltdown, yet China has to maintain large reserves of real assets to keep its currency up. IChina added a whopping 604 tons of gold in the month of June.

The WGC shows that China is ranked sixth in central bank holdings in the world, but that would be fifth if you remove the International Monetary Fund.  China’s big move here appears to be the culmination of multiyear gold buying that had been reported but had not been tabulated.

If one nation needs to do what it can to bolster its currency, it is Russia. It has been under financial pressure since its Crimea invasion.  Russia’s central bank official gold holdings were listed as being 1,275 tons. That ranks it as number 7 in the world’s gold holdings, sixth if you do not count the International Monetary Fund. Russia is a gold producer and most central bank gold acquisitions there actually take place out of that domestic market rather than on the international metals markets.

Kazakhstan has added gold in the past, and it added close to 14 more tons of gold in the first six months of 2015. The nation ranks as the 23rd largest holder of gold by central bank, but Kazakhstan would be ranked the 21st largest central bank holding gold if you account for the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Jordan did not add to its gold holdings in the central bank in the second quarter, but the first three months of 2015 saw 14 tons added so far in 2015. The WGC did not have any special notes about what this was for, but Jordan was also shown be a net acquirer of gold during both halves of 2014.

The WGC showed that Mongolia added a mere 0.7 tons via trading activity in the month of June. Its gold had fluctuated throughout 2014, also due to trading activity. What stood out was that June was the one month of gains, with 0.7 tons added — with twice as much “out” or down in the other months combined for 2015. Again, Mongolia may be an anomaly. Still the nation wants to grow its economic clout, after three years of high growth, and Mongolia even has an exchange traded fund tracking it now.

The archetypal worker in an advanced economy used to be a man on a production line or a salaryman in a city office — a secure, yet repressed, cog in a machine.

There are still millions of these, including many women, but the new world of work is both more exciting and less secure. There is greater variety, in both pay and conditions. A job is more likely to be part-time, temporary, freelance or self-employed. It may not be a job at all, in the way it used to be defined.

The gig economy is only part of a shift in employment over the past three decades, unleashed by technology and global trade.

Yet this world of insecurity and risk is also one that many people seem to appreciate. More self-employed people in Europe and the US report enjoying their jobs than those who are employed. Many entrepreneurs, even those who run a tiny business that amounts to self-employment, like their freedom and self-reliance and the possibility that they could become wealthy.

The McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the management consultancy, estimates that what it calls “online talent platforms”, job sites such as Monster.com and platforms such as Uber, could add 2 per cent to global gross domestic product by 2025, increasing employment by 72m full-time equivalents.

The ideal working life for many millennials is not finding a safe job that will last them a lifetime but creating a technology start-up, a glamorous form of small business that is backed by angel investors. They dream of being Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook or Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, not an executive of a professional services firm or public company.

The new world of work must chart a course between the twin dangers of corporate conformism and worker exploitation  The dream can be just that; the average income from self-employment fell 22 per cent in the UK between 2009 and 2014, even as self-employment contributed 732,000 of the 1.1m rise in total employment.

The challenge for policymakers is to find a new form of employment contract that suits the changing workforce.

The Labor Commissioner’s Office in California ruled in June that Uber drivers were in effect employees, not independent contractors, as the company sees them. The UK government is raising the adult minimum wage and the New York Wage Board has recommended phasing in a $15 minimum wage for the state’s fast-food workers.

The task is to limit the downside of the new economy without curtailing job growth or preventing people from working in they way they prefer.

Few want to be a cog in a machine, even if they are given the chance. The new world of work must chart a course between the twin dangers of corporate conformism and worker exploitation.

German Bund futures fell on Wednesday after comments from a top U.S. Federal Reserve official revived expectations that interest rates in the world’s biggest economy would rise in September.  Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhart said it would take “significant deterioration” in the U.S. economy for him to not support a rate hike in September, according to the Wall Street Journal. He is considered a centrist on the Fed’s policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee and has a vote on the panel this year.

Moscow wants the Iran deal.   One of the reasons why sanctions against Iran will be lifted whether or not America pulls out of the nuclear deal is that the other signatories (Russia, China, and the EU) have an economic interest in lifting those sanctions. This economic interest includes natural gas.  On the face of it, there was no reason for Russia to let Iran re-renter the natural gas market.  The two countries, after all, are competitors.

Yet a closer look at the complicated geopolitics of energy makes sense of Russia’s endgame.  The EU imports about one third of its natural gas from Russia. This relative dependency limits the EU’s leverage over Russia and, therefore, Europe’s ability to rein in Vladimir Putin’s rampant annexation of eastern Ukraine. Since Iran has one of the world’s largest natural gas reserves, it could potentially help diversify Europe’s imports. Yet it might take a decade for Iran to turn into a major natural gas supplier (not least because Iran has a high domestic demand that is likely to increase). Putin, of course, understands that Iran might become a major competitor in this field, but he appears to assess that bringing back Iran into the natural gas market may help Russia create a cartel that will artificially inflate the price of natural gas. Doing so would serve Russia’s economic interests.

Kenneth Rogoff writes: The International Monetary Fund’s acknowledgement that Greece’s debt is unsustainable could prove to be a watershed moment for the global financial system. Clearly, heterodox policies to deal with high debt burdens need to be taken more seriously, even in some advanced countries.

Ever since the onset of the Greek crisis, there have been basically three schools of thought. First, there is the view of the so-called troika (the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the IMF), which holds that the eurozone’s debt-distressed periphery (Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain) requires strong policy discipline to prevent a short-term liquidity crisis from morphing into a long-term insolvency problem.

The orthodox policy prescription was to extend conventional bridge loans to these countries, thereby giving them time to fix their budget problems and undertake structural reforms aimed at enhancing their long-term growth potential. 

A second school of thought also portrays the crisis as a pure liquidity problem, but views long-term insolvency as an outside risk at worst.

A third point of view is that, given the massive financial crisis, Europe’s debt problem should have been diagnosed as an insolvency problem from the start, and treated with debt restructuring and forgiveness.

Europe’s experience ought to spur a full rethink of the global system for administering sovereign bankruptcies. That could mean bringing back older IMF proposals for a sovereign bankruptcy mechanism, or finding ways to institutionalize the Fund’s recent stance on Greek debt. There is no free lunch in Europe, and there never was; but there are much better ways to deal with unsustainable debt. Greece’s Debt Solution

The Greek saga has gnawed at the foundations of the eurozone and distressed European unity for quite some years now. One of the greatest risks it poses is in the further erosion it causes to Franco-German relations.

The European project was built along the Paris-Berlin axis from the start. France’s political and military might and the German economic miracle created an equilibrium of sorts. Together, the countries formed a twin engine that drove the European integration process. German reunification threw the relationship off-balance to some degree, and that bond has since continued to deteriorate. For starters, France does not have a patch on Germany when it comes to economic performance. Further, the eastward expansion of the European Union has put Berlin at the Union’s geographical heart, replacing Paris as Europe’s crossroads. The credit crisis and its many ramifications have definitively put Germany on the map (not always voluntarily) as Europe’s dominant power. It is almost regarded as a hegemon.   The Price of German Power

Anthony Cordesman writes on Iran’s potential energy exports.  A comprehensive agreement with Iran could result in the lifting of oil-related sanctions against Iran and a subsequent increase in Iran’s crude oil production and exports, although the timing and details of any suspension of sanctions are uncertain. EIA has not changed its short-term projection for Iranian crude oil production, which assumes that production will stay close to the current level.

• Iran is believed to hold at least 30 million barrels in storage. It is possible that Iran will attempt to move oil out of storage more quickly sometime during the second half of 2015 in preparation to increase production if discussions on sanctions show progress. As a result, the global market may see incremental increases in Iran’s crude oil exports before seeing a substantial increase to Iran’s production, but the pace at which oil in storage could be withdrawn is uncertain.
• EIA believes that Iran has the technical capability to ramp up crude oil production by at least 700,000 bbl/d by at least the end of 2016, of which 600,000 bbl/d represents capacity that was previously shut in and 100,000 bbl/d is new capacity.
• EIA’s current STEO projects that growth in global inventories declines from 1 million bbl/d in 2015 to 100,000 bbl/d in 2016. If Iran ramps up production by 700,000 bbl/d by at least the end of 2016, then this could result in an annual average growth of about 500,000 bbl/d in global inventories in 2016, which would stress storage capacity limits and put downward pressure on prices… OPEC nontrade liquids production, which averaged 6.3 million b/d in 2014, is expected to increase by 0.1 million b/d in 2015 and by 0.2 million b/d in 2016, led by production increases in Qatar, Iran, and Kuwait.    Iran’s Potential Energy Exports