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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 · 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 · 12 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 · 12 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 · 15 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 · 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 · 15 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 · 13 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 · 12 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 · 16 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 · 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 · 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 · 13 min read

Industry · 7 August 2026

After the Cyanide

Every ounce of mined gold leaves behind roughly a tonne of processed rock and the water that carried it. What happens to that material after the last shift is the part of the industry with the longest…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Mining · 5 August 2026

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

A gold mine is not a hole with gold in it. It is a spreadsheet with a hole attached — and the single number that decides which rock is ore and which rock is waste moves every time the price does. · Mo…

Amara Okonjo · 16 min read

Craft · 5 June 2026

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

Gold's working properties are so extreme they border on the absurd — one gram drawn into three kilometres of wire. Inside a trade where the tools have barely changed and the hands are irreplaceable. ·…

Yusuf Demir · 11 min read

Industry · 4 August 2026

The Gold Inside Your Phone

Industrial demand is the quietest third of the gold market: a few tenths of a gram per handset, multiplied by billions of devices, chosen not for prestige but because nothing else conducts as reliably…

Tomas Herrera · 15 min read

History · 14 July 2026

The Gold Standard: How a Soft Yellow Metal Became Money

For roughly five thousand years, humanity kept returning to the same element to settle its debts. The story is less about greed than about the unusually boring chemistry of atomic number 79. · Gold's…

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

Science · 9 August 2026

The Metallurgy of Karat

Pure gold is too soft to hold a stone, too soft to hold an edge, and the wrong colour for half the world's taste. Almost everything you own that is gold is a designed alloy — and the design is where t…

Tomas Herrera · 16 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 · 17 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…