IMF To Sell the other 191 Tonnes of Gold It Has For Sale - This GREAT NEWS!

Recall, the IMF sold 200 tonnes to India at $1049 and another 12 tonnes to Mauritius and Sri Lanka back in December. It is now going to sell the remaining 191 tonnes in "phased-in" open market operations.   For some reason the IMF thinks that selling the whole 191 tonnes at once would disrupt the market.  I'm sure one phone call to China or Russia and they could move the whole load.  The other possibility is that the IMF is actually seeking to be a "profit maximizer" and is looking to be a "scale" seller as the price moves higher.  Some might view this as overt price-capping.  Au contraire, I suspect that the IMF may have created a potential feeding frenzy, as there are plenty of countries, hedge funds and very wealthy individuals who I'm sure would like to buy a large amount of gold at one price without running up the price. 

As Jim Sinclair has pointed out in the past:  "The history of IMF sales in the 1970s is that they allowed huge buyers to enter the market at one price. That attracts the major buyers... Selling of gold like this occurs only in bull markets and has historically been useless to stop the price increase. In fact in the 1970s these sales pushed gold higher by facilitating demand from huge interests, and will do so even more so now."  Article link:  Sinclair on IMF Gold Sales

The more interesting aspect of this situation is that the IMF is the only known seller in the world of a multi-100 tonne "chunk" of gold.  My view has been that the real price of gold would not be, obviously, the paper price on the Comex or the odd-lot price of physical trading in London,  but the price at which a large seller would be willing to sell a large amount to a big buyer or buyers.  We don't know who those buyers would be because it would behoove them to show their bid until they can define where a big block would be offered (this is basic illiquid asset trading technique).  Well, based on the nature of this announcement by the IMF, i.e. phased-in "on market" sales, we still don't necessarily have a real market price at which a large chunk of gold would be offered.  I can assure you, based on 9 years of trading illiquid securities at a large Wall St. bank, that the "large block" price is several hundred dollars above the current spot price.