India Gold - Customer Zone - Reuters

COMMODITIES GOLD GOLD: REBOUNDS WILL RISK SHIVER BATTERED AVERSION ON JAPAN AFTER BY BANISH DEBT SHARPEST U.S. CREDIT DOWNGRADE CORRECTION LOSS DOWNGRADE SINCE DESPITE FEARS? MAY CORRECTION FEARS AUGUST 2011
He also had a customer seeking to sell half a dozen Buddha statues which he had thought were gold, but were in fact brass.
"When I called him this week after the evaluation, I could tell by the way his voice changed that he was extremely disappointed.
He never came back."
At another store in the Kanda district of Tokyo, manager Kenta Okiyama spoke of a middle-aged woman dressed in brandname
clothes, the smell of her expensive perfume wafting across the store, who poured 30 rings of varying designs out on the
table in front of her.
She told Okiyama these were rings she had received from ex-husbands and boyfriends back in the heyday of the 1980s, Japan's
free-spending "bubble economy" era.
"When I showed her the 200,000 yen ($2,630) on the calculator screen, the expression on her face changed in a way I will
never forget," Okiyama said. "She became so happy and smiled, saying 'I'll take it right now.'"
Ritsuko Aoki, a 40-year-old Tokyo housewife, said she was selling old jewelry to buy domestic appliances.
"We did not even think that my old gold accessories were worth anything before we saw news about people selling their gold
on TV," she said. "If gold prices rise more, I'll look for more accessories in the depths of my closet."
VOLATILITY, HEDGING
But experts say sales of recycled gold will rise only about 5 percent this year, against 30 percent in 2009. "Either people are
waiting till the price hits $2,000 or they are running out," says Mariabi Peenya, a street side dealer in New York's Diamond
District.
Nevertheless, canny investors see opportunities in gold's price volatility. Although prices have been rising steadily since the
start of the year, gold has veered between as low as $1,600 per ounce to as high as $1,900 in August.
And if dealing in physical gold, it's much easier since there are no brokerage fees or delays in payment.
"We bought and sold twice and made a nice tidy sum," says Ivy Mok, a mother of two who lives in Bangkok. "Not very huge
because we sold, and then the price went even higher."
She and her husband dealt in small gold bars bought and sold in the well-guarded upstairs rooms of stores in the city's Chinatown
district.
"People buy and sell their gold bars right there," Mok said. "But it was very stressful for me because once you are on the
streets, you are on your own with all your gold bars and you feel very vulnerable."
Her fears are not unfounded. One of the unsavoury sides of gold's price surge has been a matching surge in crimes associated
with the metal.
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