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Markets · 8 August 2026

Moving Bullion: The Logistics Nobody Prices

…sis. · A bar's value depends on an unbroken custody record; once it leaves the accredited chain it must usually be re-refined before it can re-enter at full value. · Physical gold moves mostly as belly cargo on scheduled passenger flights, which ties bullion logistics to airline…

Ingrid Sørensen · 15 min read

Industry · 7 August 2026

How Fake Gold Is Detected

…ying to fool a person. They are trying to fool a specific test at a specific point in the chain, and they know which test that is. · That reframing explains everything about how authentication has developed. Each defence closed a route; each closure pushed forgers towards a harde…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Industry · 20 August 2026

The Refiner's Ledger

Somewhere between a mine's doré bar and a Good Delivery brick sits a chain of chlorination furnaces, electrolytic cells, assay labs and accreditation committees that decides which gold the world's markets will accept without question — and which gold gets qui…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Mining · 22 May 2026

The Other Supply Chain: Artisanal Mining and the Mercury Problem

…escapes into waterways is methylated by bacteria into a form that accumulates up the food chain, concentrating in the fish that downstream communities eat. · The scale of the emission ASGM is assessed as the single largest source of anthropogenic mercury emissions to the atmosphe…

Amara Okonjo · 15 min read

Industry · 2 July 2026

Nine Nines: Inside a Modern Gold Refinery

…99.99. Between those two numbers sit chlorine gas, aqua regia, an electrolytic cell and a chain of custody that is now as valuable as the metal itself. · Refining is two-stage: fast chlorination to ~99.5%, then electrolysis to 99.99% and above. · Fire assay, a technique older tha…

Tomas Herrera · 19 min read

Industry · 6 August 2026

The Scrap Trade

…ly a quarter of the world's annual gold supply has been gold before. It arrives as broken chains, single earrings and dental crowns, and it moves through a chain of intermediaries that most sellers never see past the first counter. · Recycled metal typically supplies around a qua…

Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read

Markets · 2 August 2026

Who Actually Sets the Gold Price

…nter market and COMEX futures, with the two tethered by the EFP spread. · The twice-daily LBMA auction is a benchmark-setting mechanism for contract settlement, not the market itself. · Regional premiums in Shanghai, Mumbai and Istanbul are logistics and policy signals, not arbit…

Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read

Markets · 11 September 2026

The Last Audit: What We Actually Know About the World's Official Gold

…ere and verified almost nowhere. Between the published number and the physical bar sits a chain of certificates, custodians and fifty-year-old count sheets. This is an attempt to walk that chain honestly. · Official sector gold holdings — around 36,000 tonnes — are reported by th…

Ingrid Sørensen · 22 min read

Markets · 17 August 2026

Paper Gold: What You Own When You Do Not Own Bars

…oves that the link between paper and physical is not a mathematical identity but a supply-chain reality. · What is paper gold? Any instrument that gives exposure to the gold price without the holder taking possession of metal. That includes exchange-traded funds, futures and opti…

Ingrid Sørensen · 23 min read

Craft · 3 August 2026

The Wedding-Season Bid: How Jewellery Demand Sets the Floor

…design and margin. They typically run from single-digit percentages on plain machine-made chain to well over twenty percent on intricate handwork, and they are the part of the price a buyer can negotiate. · Does jewellery demand actually move the gold price? It shapes the floor m…

Yusuf Demir · 15 min read

Industry · 28 July 2026

Urban Mining: The Richest Gold Ore on Earth Is in Your Old Phone

…demand, and it does not by itself reduce mining volumes while consumption grows. A supply chain that recycles more and mines the same amount has increased total supply, not cleaned up the existing one. That is an improvement worth having, described accurately. · The final irony o…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Industry · 4 August 2026

The Gold Inside Your Phone

…old-content-per-unit trends that are published years in advance by the electronics supply chain itself. The surprises, when they come, are supply-side — a refining bottleneck or a substitution breakthrough — rather than demand-side shocks. · A brief history of gold in electronics…

Tomas Herrera · 18 min read

Science · 8 August 2026

The Metal That Went Medical

…erial earns its price. Reproducibility is worth more than raw cost in a diagnostic supply chain. · Beyond the strip · Immunogold labelling has been standard in electron microscopy since the 1970s: attach gold particles of a defined size to an antibody, and their electron density…

Amara Okonjo · 19 min read

Markets · 18 August 2026

The Vault Beneath the City

…ults for a century, precisely because earmarking removes the custodian from the ownership chain. The gold is not the custodian's to seize, freeze or spend — except, as later sections of this piece will show, when politics finds a way around even that protection. · Inside the Bank…

Ingrid Sørensen · 22 min read

Craft · 22 July 2026

Hallmarks and Assay: How Anyone Proves Gold Is Gold

…ends an argument. · The erosion nobody advertises · Hallmarking's authority depends on a chain: compulsory submission, independent testing, and enforcement against unmarked or falsely marked goods. Each link is under pressure. Cross-border online sales route around jurisdictiona…

Yusuf Demir · 15 min read

Mining · 19 August 2026

Nine Grams a Tonne

…tly to daily fleet consumption at remote sites often served by a single, expensive supply chain. A mine in the high Andes or the Sahel pays not just the benchmark diesel price but a substantial logistics premium to truck fuel hundreds of kilometres to site, and that premium widen…

Amara Okonjo · 18 min read

Science · 9 August 2026

The Metallurgy of Karat

…marking above a minimum weight — currently 1 gram for gold. Very light items such as fine chains and small charms can legally be sold unhallmarked, described only by the retailer's own assertion of fineness, which is precisely where independent testing is most worth requesting. ·…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Science · 10 August 2026

Where Gold Actually Comes From

…urce and running water sorts it by density. · Why the geology explains the industry · The chain from neutron star to earring is a chain of improbabilities, and each link constrains what the modern industry can look like. Because the r-process is rare, gold is scarce in absolute t…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Industry · 7 August 2026

After the Cyanide

…r than in perpetuity. The second is a corporate one, where an ageing asset is sold down a chain of progressively smaller operators until it sits inside an entity with no balance sheet behind the bond. When that entity fails, the security covers a fraction of the work and the stat…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Markets · 20 June 2026

Bring It Home: Central Banks and the Great Gold Repatriation

…em must be shipped, re-assayed if its bars are not Good Delivery, and re-entered into the chain of custody before it can do anything at all. · Domestic vault capacity is the binding constraint on repatriation. Building it takes years and is rarely announced in advance. Interior o…

Ingrid Sørensen · 14 min read

Craft · 5 June 2026

The Alchemy of Craft: What Goldsmiths Know That Machines Don't

…nusual a decade ago. Workshops that can document a recycled or responsibly sourced supply chain increasingly treat that documentation as part of the product rather than an afterthought, alongside the hallmark and the maker's mark. · The practical mechanics are unglamorous: a work…

Yusuf Demir · 16 min read

Mining · 5 August 2026

Grade, Cut-off and the Arithmetic of an Open Pit

…ople expect · This mismatch between the pace of the gold price and the pace of the supply chain is the single most important structural fact in mine economics, and it explains a pattern repeated across every cycle: prices rise, the applause goes to explorers and developers, capit…

Amara Okonjo · 20 min read

History · 14 July 2026

The Gold Standard: How a Soft Yellow Metal Became Money

…could have imagined. Since the mid-2010s, a growing number of platforms have issued blockchain-based tokens that represent a claim on a specific quantity of allocated, vaulted gold — typically one token per gram or per fine troy ounce, redeemable for physical metal or transferab…

Marguerite Adler · 14 min read

History · 9 August 2026

The Hoard Problem: What Buried Gold Actually Tells Us

A field of gold torcs and coins is a spectacular find and a treacherous document. The people who buried it were not writing to us, and the reasons they had for putting it in the ground are exactly wha…

Marguerite Adler · 16 min read

Markets · 8 September 2026

The Real-Rate Trade: Why Gold Moves When Bond Yields Do

For two decades the gold price could be read off an inflation-linked bond screen. Then, somewhere after 2022, the relationship stopped behaving — and the argument about why has become the most consequ…

Ingrid Sørensen · 25 min read

Markets · 6 August 2026

Why Central Banks Started Buying Gold Again

For three decades official institutions were net sellers of bullion, and the policy consensus treated the metal as a museum piece. Then, quietly, the world's reserve managers reversed. The reasons are…

Ingrid Sørensen · 14 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Editorial Standards & Corrections

…nce, contact details or tip-offs to a third party, commercial or otherwise. · 12. Archive integrity · The archive is a record, not a marketing asset. Published URLs stay live. We do not silently rewrite history to make an old call look better, we do not de-index a piece because a…