Safe assets are in short supply according to both the BIS and IMF.
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/survey/so/2012/POL041112A.htm
With sovereign debt becoming riskier, as every year passes, some new safe asset has to exist to begin taking up the slack. Some believe this new safe asset will be gold or at least will include gold.
Now this BIS report suggests that an unofficial way of making gold a Tier 1 asset is to make it an optional Tier 1 asset !!!! Note the footnote ! That certainly is a way to downplay gold as a safe asset but still making it a safe asset !
http://www.bis.org/publ/bcbs128b.pdf
Footnote 32 However, at national discretion, gold bullion held in own vaults or on an allocated basis to the extent backed by bullion liabilities can be treated as cash and therefore risk-weighted at 0%.
Finally this next report also clearly lists gold among the list of safe assets but when it comes to recommendations on supply and demand of safe assets no mention is made of increasing gold as a safe asset allocation or the fact that its price needs to go up if it becomes a more widely held safe asset. Is this paper therefore recognizing gold as a safe asset but at the same time trying to reduce the focus on gold as a safe asset ?
