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Mining · 5 August 2026

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

…decision, not a geological fact: a higher gold price literally converts waste into ore. · Strip ratio — waste tonnes moved 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 state…

Amara Okonjo · 20 min read

Mining · 22 May 2026

The Other Supply Chain: Artisanal Mining and the Mercury Problem

…ation is the stated solution. Nobody agrees on what it costs. · Artisanal and small-scale mining employs millions and is the largest source of anthropogenic mercury emissions. · Mercury amalgamation persists because it is cheap, fast and requires no capital or literacy in chemist…

Amara Okonjo · 15 min read

Industry · 28 July 2026

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

…uit boards can hold two hundred. So why is most of it still going into landfill? · Concentration, not tonnage, is what makes an ore economic — and e-waste is extraordinarily concentrated by mining standards. · The bottleneck is collection and logistics, not metallurgy; the chemis…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Mining · 19 August 2026

Nine Grams a Tonne

…y's headline cost 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…

Amara Okonjo · 18 min read

Industry · 7 August 2026

After the Cyanide

…ontinue for centuries, which makes it the single largest long-term liability in hard-rock mining. · Why do tailings dams fail? Most failures trace to construction method, water management or foundation conditions rather than to a single dramatic event. Upstream-raised dams, built…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Science · 10 August 2026

Where Gold Actually Comes From

…. · A 'rich' deposit is still roughly one part gold to a million parts rock, which is why mining is an exercise in moving overburden rather than collecting treasure. · Is it true that all gold comes from exploding stars? Broadly, yes — but not from ordinary supernovae alone. Gold…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Science · 8 August 2026

The Metal That Went Medical

…u expect, and starts doing work in places no bullion bar could reach — including the test strip that told you whether you had a virus. · Gold nanoparticles are red because collective electron oscillations — surface plasmons — absorb green light at around 520 nanometres. · The col…

Amara Okonjo · 19 min read

Industry · 4 August 2026

The Gold Inside Your Phone

…w much gold is in a smartphone? Roughly 0.2 to 0.35 grams, depending on the model and generation, spread across connector plating, printed-circuit-board surface finish, and the fine wires or bumps connecting silicon dies to their packages. At typical prices that is a few dollars…

Tomas Herrera · 18 min read

History · 9 August 2026

The Hoard Problem: What Buried Gold Actually Tells Us

…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 medieval record as ordinary financial behaviour ra…

Marguerite Adler · 16 min read

Markets · 11 September 2026

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

…cated staff, secure logistics for moving bars within a vault, and a shutdown of normal operations in the sections being counted. · Statistical sampling and assay · Because drilling every bar to test its interior is neither necessary nor desirable, auditors work from statistical s…

Ingrid Sørensen · 22 min read

Markets · 6 August 2026

Why Central Banks Started Buying Gold Again

…ding metal has always been defended on grounds that sound, to an asset manager, faintly irrational. · ~1/5 Share of above-ground gold held by the official sector 1999 First Washington Agreement caps coordinated European sales 2010 Official sector turns net buyer for the first tim…

Ingrid Sørensen · 14 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Terms of Use

…· Present our reporting in a way that suggests we endorse a product, an issuer, a fund, a mining venture or a trading service. · Interfere with the security of the site, attempt to gain unauthorised access to any system, or introduce malicious code. · 4. Intellectual property · A…

Industry · 2 July 2026

Nine Nines: Inside a Modern Gold Refinery

…ia routes, trades throughput for a smaller locked inventory and is favoured by smaller operations. · The cast, and what is stamped on it · Finished gold is remelted and cast to specification. For the wholesale market the format is the Good Delivery bar: nominally 400 troy ounces,…

Tomas Herrera · 19 min read

Industry · 20 August 2026

The Refiner's Ledger

…oring, a sustained record of accurate fineness, responsible sourcing and financial and operational stability. It is fundamentally a trust credential: it lets the market treat one refiner's bar as interchangeable with another's without re-testing every bar, which is what makes gol…

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 the metal with bare hands. This is how sovereign gold is actually stored, audi…

Ingrid Sørensen · 22 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 co…

Ingrid Sørensen · 14 min read

History · 14 July 2026

The Gold Standard: How a Soft Yellow Metal Became Money

…suspended domestic convertibility during and after the First World War, the interwar restoration collapsed in the 1930s, and the last international link — dollar-gold convertibility under Bretton Woods — was suspended by the United States in August 1971. · Do central banks still…

Marguerite Adler · 14 min read

Markets · 8 August 2026

Moving Bullion: The Logistics Nobody Prices

…ecify approved carriers, sealed and manifested consignments, and pre-cleared customs declarations, usually as belly cargo on scheduled flights between hub airports with dedicated valuable-cargo handling. Sanctions screening and export licensing checks happen before the shipment m…

Ingrid Sørensen · 15 min read

Markets · 8 September 2026

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

…e as a pure play on the inverse of the US sovereign real interest rate. For an entire generation of market participants, this was the bedrock of bullion analysis, providing a clear and reliable signal in an otherwise noisy financial landscape. · That slide is now out of date. Bet…

Ingrid Sørensen · 25 min read

Industry · 6 August 2026

The Scrap Trade

…weight and the assumed fineness written down before any discussion of price. Reputable operations do this as standard. · What happens to my gold after I sell it? It is consolidated into lots, sold on to a refiner, melted, sampled and assayed properly, then refined — typically by…

Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read

Craft · 3 August 2026

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

…er they are purchasing an ornament or a store of value. They are purchasing both, and the ratio is negotiable. · That transaction, repeated across tens of thousands of counters, constitutes roughly half of world gold demand. It is also the least well understood half, because it b…

Yusuf Demir · 15 min read

Markets · 17 August 2026

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

…econd. · The costs that decide long-run outcomes are the ones nobody quotes: fund expense ratios, futures roll, storage, and the bid-offer spread on physical coins. · Logistical friction, such as the 2020 EFP dislocation, proves that the link between paper and physical is not a m…

Ingrid Sørensen · 23 min read

Craft · 5 June 2026

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

…ow. Palladium and nickel bleach the yellow out entirely to produce white gold. Change the ratio and you change the hardness, the melting range, the colour and the way the metal behaves under a graver. · Yellow 18k: typically ~75% gold, with copper and silver in near-balance for a…

Yusuf Demir · 16 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Financial Disclaimer

…nother currency bears an exchange-rate exposure that can dominate the metal's own move. · Mining equities are not bullion: producers carry operational, geological, labour, permitting, expropriation, tax and hedging risk. A producer's shares can fall in a rising gold market and ha…

Craft · 22 July 2026

Hallmarks and Assay: How Anyone Proves Gold Is Gold

…dustrial refining rather than a claim of literal chemical purity. · Alloying is not adulteration. Pure gold is too soft for most objects that get worn: a 24ct ring deforms, scratches and loses detail within months of daily use. Copper hardens and reddens; silver softens the colou…

Yusuf Demir · 15 min read

Industry · 7 August 2026

How Fake Gold Is Detected

…identifies elements present and quantifies them well. It takes seconds, requires no preparation, and damages nothing, which is why every serious dealing room owns one. · Its limitation is not a calibration problem to be solved but a physical one. The exciting radiation penetrate…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Markets · 2 August 2026

Who Actually Sets the Gold Price

…way, a persistent Shanghai premium is a demand signal, and a persistent discount is a saturation signal. Traders who watch the physical market treat these numbers as one of the few honest, unmodelled inputs available, precisely because they cannot be produced by sentiment. Somebo…

Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Editorial Standards & Corrections

…material so that there is as little to disclose as possible. Whistleblowers in refining, mining and bullion banking are encouraged to make contact through channels they control, from equipment that is not their employer's. · Practically, that means we keep contact records apart…

Policies · 6 August 2026

Privacy Policy

…itorial desk. · This policy 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 c…

Science · 9 August 2026

The Metallurgy of Karat

…esistance to deformation achieved by replacing a quarter of the mass — the clearest illustration available of why purity and usefulness pull in opposite directions. · Colour is a solid-state physics problem · Gold is yellow for a reason that most metals are not, and the reason is…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Cookie Policy

…a truncated network address, the user agent string and the response status. These are operational records used to keep the site up and to investigate abuse. They are not used to build reader profiles, are not shared for marketing, and are retained for a short rolling window befo…