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Mining · 19 August 2026

Nine Grams a Tonne

…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 until the mine is already exhausted. · The industry's headline cost figure, all-in sustaini…

Amara Okonjo · 20 min read

Mining · 5 August 2026

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

…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. · Modern open-pit gold ore is typically around one to two grams per tonne — roughly a gold ring's worth of metal in a truckload o…

Amara Okonjo · 16 min read

Industry · 4 August 2026

The Gold Inside Your Phone

…rth a few dollars at prevailing prices. · Gold is specified where a connection must not degrade: it does not form an insulating oxide, so contact resistance stays stable for decades. · Substitution is real and mostly already happened — copper bonding wire displaced gold across hi…

Tomas Herrera · 15 min read

Markets · 18 August 2026

The Vault Beneath the City

…rters who never touch the metal with bare hands. This is how sovereign gold is actually stored, audited and, occasionally, brought home. · The Bank of England holds roughly 400,000 bars for around 100 account holders, most of them foreign central banks, in vaults beneath Threadne…

Ingrid Sørensen · 21 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 what makes an ore ec…

Tomas Herrera · 21 min read

Markets · 2 August 2026

Who Actually Sets the Gold Price

…ld forward rate are a quiet early-warning system for physical tightness, visible weeks before it shows up in the headline price. · Is there one official gold price? No. The number quoted in the press is usually the spot price for unallocated gold held in London vaults, expressed…

Ingrid Sørensen · 22 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Financial Disclaimer

…ce 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 be a long-run store of value and a poor short-run investment simultaneously. · No cash flow: bullion pays no coupon and no…

Policies · 6 August 2026

Terms of Use

…automated means beyond what is permitted by our robots directives, or in a manner that degrades service for other readers. · Use our text, photography, charts or data to train, fine-tune or ground a machine learning model, or to build a derivative dataset, without a separate wri…

Science · 10 August 2026

Where Gold Actually Comes From

…-evidenced site for it. · Almost all of the gold present when Earth formed sank into the core with the iron; the gold we mine arrived later, in a bombardment known as the late veneer. · Ore is not made by geology delivering gold to one place but by hot water dissolving trace gold…

Tomas Herrera · 18 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 sellers never see past the first counter. · Recycled metal typic…

Ingrid Sørensen · 15 min read

Industry · 7 August 2026

After the Cyanide

…he 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, not the reagent itself. · Acid mine drainage generates when sulphide minerals meet air…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Science · 8 August 2026

The Metal That Went Medical

…e, and that their smallness was the whole explanation. He was right, roughly a century before anyone could image the particles and confirm it. · That divided gold is now in more laboratories, hospitals and pharmacy shelves than bullion is in most vaults, and the reason is not sca…

Amara Okonjo · 15 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 was a Cold War convenience: gol…

Ingrid Sørensen · 13 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. · Jewellery is roughly half of annu…

Yusuf Demir · 16 min read

Industry · 20 August 2026

The Refiner's Ledger

…é, the raw semi-refined alloy poured at a mine site, must be re-refined and re-assayed before it can circulate as investment or jewellery-grade gold. · A small cluster of Swiss refineries has historically processed a majority of the world's mined gold, though Emirati and Asian re…

Tomas Herrera · 20 min read

Craft · 22 July 2026

Hallmarks and Assay: How Anyone Proves Gold Is Gold

…st, on why fire assay survives · XRF, and the honest limits of instant answers · X-ray fluorescence spectrometry is the workhorse of modern testing. Irradiate a sample, read the characteristic secondary X-rays each element emits, infer composition in seconds without damaging the…

Yusuf Demir · 20 min read

Industry · 7 August 2026

How Fake Gold Is Detected

…r the interior. · Ultrasonic velocity testing is the standard front-line defence against core-filled bars, because sound travels through tungsten far faster than through gold. · For coins, precise dimensional gauging is unusually powerful: the mint's tolerances are tighter than a…

Tomas Herrera · 15 min read

Industry · 2 July 2026

Nine Nines: Inside a Modern Gold Refinery

…nes a bar's marketability as much as its fineness. · Recycled scrap is a large and often more profitable feedstock than mined doré, but it demands heavier sorting and compliance work before it ever reaches the furnace. · The metallurgy has barely changed since the 1870s; what has…

Tomas Herrera · 12 min read

History · 14 July 2026

The Gold Standard: How a Soft Yellow Metal Became Money

…argument against subordinating employment to mine output, not a dismissal of gold as a store of value. · Gold rushes and reserve accumulation are two sides of the same demand story: private discovery in the nineteenth century, official-sector diversification in the twenty-first.…

Marguerite Adler · 14 min read

Science · 9 August 2026

The Metallurgy of Karat

…loy — 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 — which is why it is alloyed before…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Markets · 8 August 2026

Moving Bullion: The Logistics Nobody Prices

…oken custody record; once it leaves the accredited chain it must usually be re-refined before it can re-enter at full value. · Physical gold moves mostly as belly cargo on scheduled passenger flights, which ties bullion logistics to airline capacity. · Bar formats differ between…

Ingrid Sørensen · 17 min read

Markets · 17 August 2026

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

…d is a general claim on the bank for a quantity of metal; it earns and costs nothing to store because it is a liability of the bank, and in a default the holder is an unsecured creditor. · Can I take delivery of gold from a futures contract? If you hold a COMEX contract into the…

Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read

Craft · 5 June 2026

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

…that cannot be fabricated. Poor examples of each are easy to find, and the maker matters more than the method. · Why does the same weight of gold cost so differently between pieces? Because making charges vary enormously. Metal is a commodity priced by the gram; labour, design, f…

Yusuf Demir · 11 min read

History · 9 August 2026

The Hoard Problem: What Buried Gold Actually Tells Us

…cord. · Legal frameworks that reward reporting — rather than punishing finders — recover more archaeology than prohibition does. · 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 technolog…

Marguerite Adler · 16 min read

Mining · 22 May 2026

The Other Supply Chain: Artisanal Mining and the Mercury Problem

…d where feasible eliminate mercury use in the sector. · The pit is four metres deep and shored with cut branches. Two men work at the bottom filling rice sacks with grey sediment; a third hauls them up on a rope. At the river's edge, a fourth swirls the contents of a shallow stee…

Amara Okonjo · 12 min read

Markets · 6 August 2026

Why Central Banks Started Buying Gold Again

…ability. · Central banks are price-insensitive, slow buyers; their flow sets a floor far more often than it sets a headline. · Reported reserve figures are lagging, partly voluntary, and occasionally revised years later. · Leasing gold for yield has fallen out of favour precisely…

Ingrid Sørensen · 17 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Cookie Policy

…t a cookie actually is · A cookie is a small text file that a site asks your browser to store and send back on subsequent requests. Related technologies — local storage, session storage and pixel requests — achieve similar ends by different means. This policy covers all of them,…

Policies · 6 August 2026

Editorial Standards & Corrections

…rior review over an article, and none is granted one. Copy is never shown to a subject before publication except where narrowly necessary to check a technical fact, and then only the specific passage in question, never the framing or the conclusions. · 3. Sourcing and verificatio…

Policies · 6 August 2026

Privacy Policy

…with data brokers. Where the tooling supports it, IP addresses are truncated or hashed before storage. · 2.3 Information you volunteer · If you write to the editorial desk — to file a correction, to offer a document, to pitch a story or to make a complaint — we receive whatever y…