Search
Search the whole magazine.
Full-text search across every article — headlines, decks, body copy, pull quotes, captions and FAQs — plus our editorial and legal policies.
7 results for “central bank reserves” in Industry
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
