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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

…nsisted largely of checking that compartment seals are unbroken. · Foreign custody at the Bank of England and the New York Fed is normal and practical, but it substitutes a custodian's attestation for physical inspection by the owner. · Germany's repatriation programme, completed…

Ingrid Sørensen · 22 min read

Markets · 18 August 2026

The Vault Beneath the City

Beneath the Bank of England and beneath lower Manhattan sit two of the largest concentrations of monetary gold on earth, moved between anonymous compartments by a handful of porters who never touch the…

Ingrid Sørensen · 22 min read

Markets · 8 September 2026

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

…as the dominant driver? No single variable. The best-supported account combines sustained central-bank purchases, reserve managers reassessing the safety of foreign-currency claims, and steady physical demand in India, China and the Gulf that does not respond to Western real-yiel…

Ingrid Sørensen · 25 min read

Industry · 2 July 2026

Nine Nines: Inside a Modern Gold Refinery

…s, scientific 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 re…

Tomas Herrera · 19 min read

History · 14 July 2026

The Gold Standard: How a Soft Yellow Metal Became Money

…vertibility under Bretton Woods — was suspended by the United States in August 1971. · Do central banks still hold gold? Yes. Central banks and international institutions remain among the largest single holders of above-ground gold, and official-sector buying has been a significa…

Marguerite Adler · 14 min read

Markets · 2 August 2026

Who Actually Sets the Gold Price

…Shanghai, Mumbai and Istanbul are logistics and policy signals, not arbitrage failures. · 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 f…

Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read

Science · 8 August 2026

The Metal That Went Medical

…ce an entirely different bar, because the body's inability to metabolise gold becomes the central safety question rather than a footnote. · Regulators have pushed hard on particle clearance data as a result. Below roughly 5–6 nanometres, gold particles are small enough to pass th…

Amara Okonjo · 19 min read

History · 9 August 2026

The Hoard Problem: What Buried Gold Actually Tells Us

…ay to day. · Why did people bury gold instead of storing it? In societies with no deposit banking, the ground was the safe. Burial is a rational storage technology when the alternative is a wooden building that can burn or be robbed, and it appears throughout the ancient and medi…

Marguerite Adler · 16 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

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

Industry · 20 August 2026

The Refiner's Ledger

…h is what makes gold genuinely fungible at wholesale scale. · Why are Swiss refineries so central to the gold trade? A handful of Swiss refineries built, over the twentieth century, an outsized share of the world's large-scale refining capacity, technical expertise in high-purity…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Markets · 17 August 2026

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

…ounts are the plumbing of the wholesale market and are, in law, an unsecured claim on the bank rather than ownership of metal. · Fewer than two per cent of COMEX gold futures contracts typically go to delivery; the contract is a price instrument first and a delivery mechanism sec…

Ingrid Sørensen · 23 min read

Markets · 8 August 2026

Moving Bullion: The Logistics Nobody Prices

…y means specific numbered bars belong to you; unallocated means you are a creditor of the bank, and the difference only becomes visible in a crisis. · A bar's value depends on an unbroken custody record; once it leaves the accredited chain it must usually be re-refined before it…

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

Policies · 6 August 2026

Financial Disclaimer

…read our numbers · Prices, spreads, all-in sustaining costs, grades, reserve tonnages and central bank holdings quoted in our articles are accurate to the best of our knowledge as at the date of publication printed on the page. Markets move; official statistics are revised; compa…

Policies · 6 August 2026

Editorial Standards & Corrections

…rification · Primary documents first: filings, permits, assay certificates, customs data, central bank statistical releases, court records and audited accounts outrank commentary about them. · Two-source rule: a contested factual claim central to a story requires at least two ind…

Industry · 7 August 2026

After the Cyanide

…ing standard handles gracefully. · Problem three: the wall · Tailings are stored behind embankments, and how those embankments are built determines how they fail. There are three basic methods, and the distinction is not academic. · Downstream construction raises each successive…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Mining · 22 May 2026

The Other Supply Chain: Artisanal Mining and the Mercury Problem

…es everything downstream. A miner earning daily needs to be paid daily. A miner without a bank account needs cash. A miner whose claim has no legal title cannot borrow against it, so equipment is financed by the buyer — who then sets the price. The informal buyer at the roadside…

Amara Okonjo · 15 min read

Craft · 3 August 2026

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

…n an afternoon at a shop within walking distance has obvious appeal. It is also, unlike a bank deposit, an asset a woman may hold in her own name in family structures where other property is not hers. That is not a sentimental observation; it is a substantial part of why the dema…

Yusuf Demir · 15 min read

Industry · 7 August 2026

How Fake Gold Is Detected

…ered in bar-counterfeiting cases, precisely because nobody tests a wedding ring the way a bank tests a bar. · Why hallmarking regimes differ so much in effectiveness · Jurisdictions with compulsory, independent assay-office hallmarking — where a government or delegated body tests…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Craft · 5 June 2026

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

…older and less discussed tradition. Depletion gilding — used by pre-Columbian Andean and Central American goldsmiths on gold-copper alloys — involves etching the surface with a mild acid that dissolves copper preferentially, leaving a thin, enriched layer of near-pure gold at th…

Yusuf Demir · 16 min read

Industry · 6 August 2026

The Scrap Trade

…0 conflict minerals provisions required US-listed manufacturers to disclose sourcing from central African conflict zones, a rule since narrowed but influential well beyond its own jurisdiction because it pushed downstream buyers to demand documentation from refiners who had never…

Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Privacy Policy

…cy applies only to this website. Where an article links out to a mining company filing, a central bank statistical release, an exchange rulebook or a third-party research paper, that destination is governed by its own privacy practices, which we neither control nor endorse. We re…

Policies · 6 August 2026

Terms of Use

…ar period. · 7. Third-party links · Articles link to primary sources: regulatory filings, central bank releases, exchange rulebooks, academic papers, NGO field reports. Those links are provided for verification and further reading. We do not control the destinations, do not endor…

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

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

Industry · 28 July 2026

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

A tonne of good underground ore holds a few grams of gold. A tonne of discarded circuit boards can hold two hundred. So why is most of it still going into landfill? · Concentration, not tonnage, is wh…

Tomas Herrera · 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

Policies · 6 August 2026

Cookie Policy

…wear you down: a preference held on your device is precisely the kind of thing we cannot centralise without building the reader profile we have chosen not to build. · 8. Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control · We honour the Global Privacy Control signal where your browser or e…