Demand For Gold Maple Leafs Explodes

The Royal Canadian Mint has released its annual report for 2008, which was delayed because of a missing-gold scandal that took months to resolve. Other than that incident, and another scandal where $3 million' worth of gold was sold to a scrap refiner at too deep a discount, the report showed amazing numbers.

The mint's downtown Ottawa operation sold 896,701 ounces of gold in coins, wafers and kilo bars in 2008, a 222 per cent increase from 278,616 ounces in 2007. Sales of silver coins soared, too, to 8.8 million ounces from 3.5 million the previous year.

Call me an apologist for the mint if you like, but common sense suggests that the missing-gold and scrap-sale scandals were caused by the workload exploding due to demand exploding. The same hurried carelessness shows up in financial instiututions when the stock market's hot.