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Markets · 20 June 2026

Bring It Home: Central Banks and the Great Gold Repatriation

…ntury it was rational to store your gold in someone else's basement. Then the calculus of counterparty risk changed, and reserve managers started chartering aircraft. · Overseas custody was a Cold War convenience: gold near a trading centre could be mobilised quickly. · Repatriat…

Ingrid Sørensen · 13 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Financial Disclaimer

…diction and who has taken the trouble to understand your circumstances. · 2. The specific risks of this asset class · Price volatility: gold is often described as a haven, yet it has repeatedly lost a third or more of its value in real terms over multi-year periods. A metal can b…

Markets · 8 August 2026

Moving Bullion: The Logistics Nobody Prices

…ghly the cost of closing the gap. · Is stored gold insured? Professional vaults carry all-risks cover, but the terms matter more than the headline. Read for the per-location limit, whether cover applies in transit and at rest, what exclusions apply for war and confiscation, and w…

Ingrid Sørensen · 17 min read

Markets · 6 August 2026

Why Central Banks Started Buying Gold Again

…nencumbered 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, slow buyers; their flow sets a floor far more often than it sets a head…

Ingrid Sørensen · 17 min read

Craft · 3 August 2026

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

…rential between the domestic and international price widens until it exceeds the cost and risk of carrying metal across a border unofficially — at which point it is carried. · Mandatory hallmarking has been the more effective intervention, and for a different reason. By requiring…

Yusuf Demir · 16 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Privacy Policy

…cure, and we will not pretend otherwise. If a breach occurs that is likely to result in a risk to your rights and freedoms, we will notify the competent supervisory authority within seventy-two hours of becoming aware of it, and will notify affected individuals directly where the…

Mining · 22 May 2026

The Other Supply Chain: Artisanal Mining and the Mercury Problem

…t — gravity concentration, borax smelting, cyanide in controlled plants — but each shifts risk rather than eliminating it. · Traceability schemes work only where miners can actually access a legal buyer at a fair price. · What is artisanal and small-scale gold mining? ASGM refers…

Amara Okonjo · 12 min read

Industry · 7 August 2026

After the Cyanide

…is the only reagent that dissolves gold selectively at industrial scale and low cost; the risk lies in handling and storage, not in the chemistry being exotic. · Free cyanide degrades in sunlit water over weeks; the durable hazards at a closed mine are usually metals and acidity,…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Industry · 7 August 2026

How Fake Gold Is Detected

…and treat any deep discount to spot as what it almost always is — a price that reflects a risk the seller understands better than the buyer does.

Tomas Herrera · 15 min read

Industry · 2 July 2026

Nine Nines: Inside a Modern Gold Refinery

…ore has to travel as paperwork alongside the metal: mine certificates, transport records, counterparty due diligence and audit. Refiners now maintain compliance teams comparable in size to their metallurgical staff. · Recycling, which is most of the business · It surprises people…

Tomas Herrera · 12 min read

Industry · 4 August 2026

The Gold Inside Your Phone

…ermanently and is not coming back. What it also demonstrated is the shape of substitution risk in this market: it is slow, it is capital-intensive, it requires requalification of every affected part, and once it happens it is irreversible. Nobody converts back to gold because the…

Tomas Herrera · 15 min read

Industry · 6 August 2026

The Scrap Trade

…akes a margin, and each margin is defensible on its own terms — the counter carries fraud risk and holding cost, the consolidator carries transport and insurance, the refiner carries process losses. Stacked, they explain most of the gap between spot and what a seller is offered.…

Ingrid Sørensen · 15 min read

Industry · 28 July 2026

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

…n by the last few hundred million years of hydrothermal activity. There is no exploration risk. There is only the far more mundane problem of getting the ore to the plant.

Tomas Herrera · 13 min read

Markets · 2 August 2026

Who Actually Sets the Gold Price

…— it is telling you that physical metal cannot travel, not that the market has mispriced risk. · Does the Shanghai premium mean the price is wrong? No. It means the cost of getting an internationally accepted bar into a market with import licensing, a domestic exchange and its o…

Ingrid Sørensen · 15 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Editorial Standards & Corrections

…Named sources are the default. Anonymity is granted only where a source faces a credible risk of retaliation, prosecution or dismissal, is approved by the editor, and is explained to the reader in the text. · Numbers are checked against their original release, not against a seco…

Policies · 6 August 2026

Terms of Use

…ey. We do not know your financial position, your tax residence, your time horizon or your risk tolerance, and we make no assessment of suitability or appropriateness for you. · Precious metals markets are volatile. Prices can fall as well as rise, leverage can amplify losses beyo…

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 · 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 · 12 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

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 · 8 August 2026

The Metal That Went Medical

Divide gold finely enough and it stops being gold-coloured, stops being inert in the way you expect, and starts doing work in places no bullion bar could reach — including the test strip that told you…

Amara Okonjo · 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 · 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 · 18 min read