London gold bullion meantime fell almost $20 per Troy ounce into the City's 3pm benchmarking auction, fix around $3014 while New York's most active Comex gold futures contract traded at $3023.

 

That gap – effectively the incentive to fly gold bullion west across the Atlantic – more typically runs to just a couple of dollars.

 

But the Comex-London arb leapt to $50 per ounce in February as trade-tariff fears jumped, and it's now sucked in a record quantity of gold to New York warehouses, more than doubling those stockpiles since Trump re-won the Presidency last November to build a "glut" now equal to well over 4 years of total US gold demand.

 

 

"February merchandise-trade data on Thursday are likely to show the [total net] deficit grew to almost $162 billion," says Bloomberg News, quoting Spanish bank Santander's US Capital Markets team and pointing to the impact of heavy gold imports on the world No.1 economy's trade deficit as banks, dealers and manufacturers rush to land metal ahead of Trump's possible tariffs. 

 

The surge in US gold imports has helped knock first-quarter economic growth forecasts sharply lower, Bloomberg notes, with the Atlanta Fed's much-followed GDPNow prediction plunging to minus 1.8% annualized.

 

That figure would read above zero if gold imports – made solely to protect against and exploit the gap between New York futures and global gold prices – were excluded.

 

"A lot of copper has flowed to the United States, drawn by higher prices, leading to reduced imports" to world No.2 economy and No.1 manufacturing nation China, Reuters quotes one base metals trader.

 

"The legal authority that Trump chooses to use is important" in how the US applies tariffs next week, analysts at UK bank Barclays say – predicting that the White House could hit "15 to 25 nations" – "because it will drive how quickly the tariffs can be implemented.

 

"Based on his past actions, we think President Trump is unlikely to wait."

 

Also pouring into New York storage ahead of possible trade tariffs, silver today held onto Tuesday's price rebound, with the more industrially useful precious metal trading at $33.68 per Troy ounce in London and 40 cents higher on the US CME's May Comex futures contract.

 

New York's tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 share index meantime dropped 0.9% from yesterday's 3-week high – down at what was a 5-month low when hit early in March – while European equity bourses today lost 0.5% to trade in the middle of this month's range.