My experience that taught me to have my precious metal bars in my posession was this. I'd been buying bars of gold and silver from a major bullion dealer in Brisbane who offered free storage, which I took them up on. In return I got a certificate stating how many bars I had stored, and was told I could collect them at any time during business hours.
Then we had the meltdown in September 2008, Lehmans collapsed and the world financial markets went into panic. Silver in particular was becoming very hard to buy in physical form. I wanted my bars and told the dealer I would be up the next day to collect them, and was told that might be a problem, they didn't have any kilogram bars of silver to give me. Somewhat shocked I went into Brisbane anyway to sort this out, they couldn't tell me when or if I was going to get my kg bars. They did have gold bars to give me, and the only silver they said they had on hand was a 15 kg bar. I said that I would take that, and paid them for the extra kgs, after embarrassing them enough to get a bit of a discount, which in reality was only in line with the fact that I had one large bar rather than 15x 1kg bars.
That night gold and silver rose in price substantially, and it took a long time for silver bars to become freely available again. I was feeling much safer with my metal once it was in my posession, and will never trust a bullion dealer to that extent again. It seems at all levels in the precious metals market, if you don't have it in your posession, you don't really know for sure if it is actually there, or has been sold many times over to other entities.
As Harvey and Lenny Organ found out with their bullion holding at ScotiaMocatta in Canada. There was very little in the vaults at Canada's only bullion bank vault.
