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26 results for “Reserves vs resources”
Mining · 5 August 2026
Grade, Cut-off and the Arithmetic of an Open Pit
…oved per ore tonne — is often the difference between a viable pit and an abandoned one. · Reserves are the economically mineable subset of resources under a stated price assumption, and they are restated every year. · All-in sustaining cost excludes the capital that built the min…
Amara Okonjo · 20 min read
Markets · 20 June 2026
Bring It Home: Central Banks and the Great Gold Repatriation
…y. · Repatriation is driven less by distrust of custodians than by the demonstration that reserves can be immobilised. · Bringing gold home imposes real costs: vault construction, insurance, audit and lost liquidity. · The trend interacts with sustained official-sector buying, ti…
Ingrid Sørensen · 14 min read
Markets · 6 August 2026
Why Central Banks Started Buying Gold Again
…by emerging-market reserve managers rebuilding a domestically held, unencumbered share of reserves. · Gold's appeal to a reserve manager is that it carries no counterparty: it cannot be frozen by the issuer of another country's liability. · Central banks are price-insensitive, sl…
Ingrid Sørensen · 14 min read
Markets · 11 September 2026
The Last Audit: What We Actually Know About the World's Official Gold
…e else is currently using. The market reads all three as the first. A former central bank reserves manager, interviewed for this piece · What a physical audit actually involves · It is worth being precise about what the word 'audit' means in this context, because casual usage has…
Ingrid Sørensen · 22 min read
Markets · 18 August 2026
The Vault Beneath the City
…st of them foreign central banks, in vaults beneath Threadneedle Street. · Sovereign gold reserves are usually 'earmarked', not pooled: specific bars are allocated to a specific owner and never mixed with the Bank's own holdings. · Germany's 2013–2017 repatriation of 300 tonnes f…
Ingrid Sørensen · 22 min read
Craft · 22 July 2026
Hallmarks and Assay: How Anyone Proves Gold Is Gold
A hallmark is one of the oldest consumer protection technologies in continuous use. It is also, on close inspection, a small masterpiece of institutional design — and it is being quietly eroded. · A h…
Yusuf Demir · 15 min read
Markets · 8 August 2026
Moving Bullion: The Logistics Nobody Prices
Between the vault and the buyer sits an industry of armoured vehicles, sealed cargo, bonded warehouses and insurance clauses. It rarely makes news, and it is the reason a spot price in London can dive…
Ingrid Sørensen · 15 min read
Mining · 19 August 2026
Nine Grams a Tonne
…st figure, all-in sustaining cost, still excludes major items such as exploration for new reserves and initial capital, understating the true cost of replacing an ounce. · Average mined ore grades have fallen for decades — global open-pit averages now sit close to one gram per to…
Amara Okonjo · 18 min read
Markets · 17 August 2026
Paper Gold: What You Own When You Do Not Own Bars
Most of the world's gold exposure is a contract, not a metal. Futures, unallocated accounts and exchange-traded funds each promise gold in a different way — and the differences only become visible whe…
Ingrid Sørensen · 23 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 · 17 min read
Craft · 3 August 2026
The Wedding-Season Bid: How Jewellery Demand Sets the Floor
Half the world's gold is worn, not stored. In India and China that distinction barely exists — and the buying behaviour it produces is the most reliably contrarian force in the entire market. · Jewell…
Yusuf Demir · 15 min read
History · 14 July 2026
The Gold Standard: How a Soft Yellow Metal Became Money
…c monetary policy. · Did gold finance wars, or did wars end the gold standard? Both. Gold reserves and gold-backed borrowing financed the belligerents of the First World War, but sustaining that finance required suspending convertibility almost everywhere, since no state could fi…
Marguerite Adler · 14 min read
Markets · 8 September 2026
The Real-Rate Trade: Why Gold Moves When Bond Yields Do
…with an inflation-linked bond on a Bloomberg screen; it is deciding what fraction of its reserves should sit in an asset that no other government can freeze, sanction or decline to honour. That is a question about the legal and political properties of a claim, not about carry. I…
Ingrid Sørensen · 25 min read
Markets · 2 August 2026
Who Actually Sets the Gold Price
…· Central banks and ETF flows move the price in opposite directions on different clocks: reserves are slow and price-insensitive, funds are fast and price-chasing. · Lease rates and the gold forward rate are a quiet early-warning system for physical tightness, visible weeks befo…
Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read
Industry · 7 August 2026
How Fake Gold Is Detected
…st takes under a minute and costs a fraction of an assay. · 19.32 / 19.25 Density of gold vs tungsten (g/cm³) 3,240 / 5,180 Sound velocity, gold vs tungsten (m/s) ~30 µm Practical XRF sampling depth in gold ±0.01 mm Dimensional tolerance a modern mint holds · Coins are a differen…
Tomas Herrera · 16 min read
History · 9 August 2026
The Hoard Problem: What Buried Gold Actually Tells Us
…ner, spent, remelted or inherited leaves no trace at all. What the archaeological record preserves is disproportionately the product of catastrophe — invasion, plague, sudden death — and of ritual deposition that was never intended to be recovered. · That skews the picture in way…
Marguerite Adler · 16 min read
Industry · 2 July 2026
Nine Nines: Inside a Modern Gold Refinery
…reference materials. · For everything else — coins, bars, jewellery alloys, central bank reserves — four nines is the end of the road, and it is close enough to the theoretical ideal that the remaining 0.01 per cent is mostly a rounding error in trace silver. The refinery's real…
Tomas Herrera · 19 min read
Industry · 4 August 2026
The Gold Inside Your Phone
…market is usually described in two halves: jewellery on one side, investment and official reserves on the other. Between them sits a third category that rarely gets a paragraph, because it involves quantities too small to photograph and applications too dull to romanticise. Techn…
Tomas Herrera · 18 min read
Science · 8 August 2026
The Metal That Went Medical
…dominates the cost conversation in every other application from jewellery to central bank reserves. It is also why nanogold manufacturers do not behave like bullion traders. They do not hedge gold price exposure the way a refiner or a jeweller does, because the metal is such a sm…
Amara Okonjo · 19 min read
Industry · 28 July 2026
Urban Mining: The Richest Gold Ore on Earth Is in Your Old Phone
…evices, per kilogram Lower Typical life-cycle emissions per gram, formal e-waste recovery vs primary mining Reversed That comparison's direction once informal, unpermitted recovery is substituted
Tomas Herrera · 16 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 · 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 · 16 min read
Mining · 22 May 2026
The Other Supply Chain: Artisanal Mining and the Mercury Problem
A significant share of the world's gold is produced by people working with hand tools, informal finance and a neurotoxin. Formalisation is the stated solution. Nobody agrees on what it costs. · Artisa…
Amara Okonjo · 15 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 mar…
Tomas Herrera · 17 min read
Industry · 6 August 2026
The Scrap Trade
Roughly 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 selle…
Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read
Science · 10 August 2026
Where Gold Actually Comes From
Every gram of gold on Earth was manufactured in an astrophysical catastrophe, arrived here after the planet had already formed, and was then concentrated by hot water. Three separate accidents, none o…
Tomas Herrera · 17 min read
