What is Britain’s biggest physical export? Given that the UK has some of Europe’s most advanced car factories, you might have assumed the answer was motor vehicles. Or perhaps pharmaceuticals, or engines, or crude oil from the North Sea?
No. In July, the latest month for which we have the figures, Britain’s biggest physical export was gold.
That might, on the face of it, seem a little odd. Britain has no substantial gold mines. It has barely any refineries, save for those which melt down scrap metal or mint souvenir coins. The vast majority of the world’s gold is, of course, dug out of the ground elsewhere: in South Africa, the US and Canada. So why, when we look at the world’s biggest gold exporters, is Britain routinely up there in the top five?
The short answer is that London is the hub for the world’s physical gold market. Sitting underneath the ground in warehouses inside the M25 are vaults containing well over half a million bars of bullion, worth a grand total of about $300 billion: roughly the equivalent of £9,000 for every household in the country.
Sadly this gold, much of which is in the Bank of England’s vaults, isn’t owned by the British people, the government or the bank itself. Instead, it is stored on behalf of other central banks, financial groups and wealthy investors. Just as the Square Mile has long been the world’s favourite place to invest, so it has also long been the world’s favourite place to store gold.
The precious metals storage and transport business is sometimes dismissed as a bit of an economic backwater. Moving and storing a gold bar is really just a logistics job, albeit with slightly higher insurance premiums. And such is the secrecy and security in the trade that most of its practitioners would be happier if you didn’t realise it was going on at all.
Which is why most people are oblivious of the fact that when they fly from Johannesburg to Heathrow, or from London to Zurich, there is a reasonable chance that they are sharing their flight with a gold bar or two, rattling in a crate somewhere beneath their seats. But while gold bars can pass between countries relatively innocuously, their value means that they will nonetheless show up in the national statistics. This has given rise to some rather odd statistical anomalies.
When last year, in the months following the EU referendum, there was a sudden jump in Britain’s exports, some economists interpreted it as a vote of confidence in the post-Brexit economy or, at the very least, a fillip from the weaker pound. As it turns out, the majority of that sudden uptick was accounted for, single-handedly, by gold. The days surrounding the referendum saw a massive surge in sales of bullion as investors took fright at the changing political weather and loaded up on the safe haven investment. There was a similar response to President Trump’s election. Then, at the end of the year, some of those foreign investors shifted some of their gold out of London and brought it back home.
In other words, far from being a sign of confidence in Brexit Britain, this was quite the opposite: evidence of the jitters. But since London is where you come to buy the world’s safe haven investment, and since statistical conventions stipulate that gold is marked down as a UK export when it leaves the country, this flight to safety manifested itself as a sudden jump in UK trade. The export spike was so big it even pushed up gross domestic product.
These flows are terrifically volatile, and the smart thing would be to ignore them. After all, the gold is simply passing through, benefiting only a cottage industry of traders and custodians. But even as the Office for National Statistics confronts the problem, the numbers still distort the big economic picture. While July’s gold exports were particularly high, when you average things out over the past five years, bullion was still Britain’s second-biggest physical export, after cars but ahead of pharmaceuticals and oil.
And here’s the thing: since the majority of the bars go to China, India and Switzerland (where they are mostly melted down from heavy London good delivery bars into the smaller kilo bars Asian investors prefer), this all shows up as non-EU exports. The upshot is that Britain’s exports outside the EU look far bigger than they really are.
This raises doubts about one of the few Brexit claims which has yet to be challenged. The official trade figures produced by HM Revenue & Customs show that over the past five years the share of UK exports going to the EU has dropped to 46 per cent. This fact — that Britain now exports far more outside the EU than inside — was repeatedly referenced by the Leave camp as evidence that Britain could safely leave the trade bloc. However, my calculations show that when you strip gold out of the statistics, the EU still receives half of Britain’s goods exports. Falling, yes, but not as far or as fast as the official numbers might have you believe.
Britain, it turns out, is not quite the great trading nation that it may have thought it was: 9 per cent less great, to be precise. This is hardly a cause for panic but nor is it irrelevant. Forging the appropriate relationships with Europe and the rest of the world cannot happen until we understand what actually makes our economy tick. A good place to start would be to get the trade figures straight.
Ed Conway’s film on the gold trade will be shown on Sky News today