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Science · 9 August 2026

The Metallurgy of Karat

…u own that is gold is a designed alloy — and the design is where the engineering lives. · Karat is a fraction, not a quality grade: 24 parts by mass, so 18k is 75.0% gold and 9k is 37.5%. · Pure gold measures roughly 25 HV on the Vickers scale — softer than a fingernail can dent…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Craft · 5 June 2026

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

…· Pure gold is too soft for most wear; alloying trades purity for hardness and colour. · Karat is a fraction out of 24 — 18k is 75 per cent gold by mass. · Ancient techniques such as granulation and repoussé remain hand skills with no full machine equivalent. · CAD and casting h…

Yusuf Demir · 16 min read

Craft · 22 July 2026

Hallmarks and Assay: How Anyone Proves Gold Is Gold

…remains the referee method; XRF is fast and non-destructive but reads only the surface. · Karat and fineness describe the same thing on different scales: 18ct is 750 parts per thousand gold. · Plating, filling and surface enrichment are the failure modes that surface-reading inst…

Yusuf Demir · 15 min read

Craft · 3 August 2026

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

…y is roughly half of annual gold demand, and the majority of it is bought in Asia. · High-karat jewellery in India and China functions as savings with a wearable form factor, not as fashion. · Physical buyers are contrarian: demand strengthens on price weakness and stalls on rall…

Yusuf Demir · 15 min read

Industry · 7 August 2026

How Fake Gold Is Detected

…eference method; every non-destructive technique is a proxy calibrated against it. · Underkarated jewellery, not exotic tungsten-cored bars, is the fraud that costs the industry the most money overall, because it is quiet, distributed across thousands of small items, and invisibl…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Mining · 5 August 2026

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

…s clothes. Before comparing two producers on cost per ounce, check how much of the gap is explained by byproduct credits rather than by genuine differences in grade, strip ratio or metallurgy. · Taxation, royalties and the government's share · Every tonne of ore that clears cut-o…

Amara Okonjo · 20 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

Industry · 6 August 2026

The Scrap Trade

…dator: buying accumulated lots from many counters, doing a more careful assay, sorting by karat and by whether the item is worth more intact than melted. The refiner: melting the lot, taking a representative sample, running a proper assay and settling on assayed content rather th…

Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read

Markets · 11 September 2026

The Last Audit: What We Actually Know About the World's Official Gold

…efore anyone opens a vault door, are usually clerical; but a genuine audit treats every unexplained line as a flag requiring physical resolution, not administrative closure. · Physical count and weighing · The second stage is where the exercise becomes expensive. Bars are removed…

Ingrid Sørensen · 22 min read

Markets · 8 September 2026

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

…fell. The relationship was tight enough to be traded as a spread, hedged as a spread, and explained on a single slide. It was a rare example of a multi-trillion-dollar market appearing to obey a single, simple command. This predictability made gold a staple of macro-economic mode…

Ingrid Sørensen · 25 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Editorial Standards & Corrections

…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 secondary report of it. Units, currencies and time periods are stated explicitly — tr…

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

Markets · 20 June 2026

Bring It Home: Central Banks and the Great Gold Repatriation

For half a century 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 w…

Ingrid Sørensen · 14 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

What does it actually cost to pull an ounce of gold out of the ground? The honest answer runs through grade decline, energy and water bills, permitting delays and the closure liabilities nobody prices…

Amara Okonjo · 18 min read

Industry · 2 July 2026

Nine Nines: Inside a Modern Gold Refinery

A doré bar arrives at 85 per cent purity and leaves at 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 i…

Tomas Herrera · 19 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 · 18 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 · 19 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

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 th…

Ingrid Sørensen · 22 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

Markets · 2 August 2026

Who Actually Sets the Gold Price

There is no single gold price. There is a London settlement number, a New York futures curve, a Shanghai premium and a jeweller's counter in Dubai — and the distance between them is where the market l…

Ingrid Sørensen · 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 · 14 min read