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Industry · 7 August 2026

After the Cyanide

…als meet air and water, and can run for centuries without intervention. · Upstream-raised tailings dams — built on their own deposited waste — carry the worst failure record and are now banned or being phased out in several jurisdictions. · Closure liabilities are supposed to be…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Mining · 5 August 2026

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

…That number is the entire business. Everything else at a mine — the fleet, the mill, the tailings facility, the workforce, the community agreement, the closure bond — is machinery for turning grade into cash flow at an acceptable cost per tonne. To understand why gold mining beh…

Amara Okonjo · 20 min read

Industry · 4 August 2026

The Gold Inside Your Phone

…uman body for decades. The reliability requirements in these applications are absolute; a failure could have catastrophic consequences for the patient. · Beyond electronics, gold nanoparticles are being used in targeted drug delivery systems and as contrast agents in advanced ima…

Tomas Herrera · 18 min read

Markets · 8 September 2026

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

…crisis, and gold, which the model said should have fallen hard, did not. It went up. The failure has forced a market that had grown comfortable with one variable to rebuild its account of what actually sets the price. This reconstruction process has revealed a much more complex…

Ingrid Sørensen · 25 min read

Mining · 19 August 2026

Nine Grams a Tonne

…is required to close the pit or underground workings, remove or stabilise waste rock and tailings, treat any residual water contamination, and rehabilitate the surface, funded by a closure bond posted before mining even begins. In practice, closure costs are frequently underesti…

Amara Okonjo · 18 min read

Mining · 22 May 2026

The Other Supply Chain: Artisanal Mining and the Mercury Problem

…oles that carry their own distinct mercury exposure. · Land degradation and mercury-laden tailings often outlast the mining itself, affecting agriculture and fisheries for years after a site is abandoned. · What is artisanal and small-scale gold mining? ASGM refers to mining carr…

Amara Okonjo · 15 min read

Industry · 20 August 2026

The Refiner's Ledger

…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 gold genuinely fungible at whole…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Markets · 20 June 2026

Bring It Home: Central Banks and the Great Gold Repatriation

…s. The Netherlands quietly moved a substantial tranche of reserves from New York to Amsterdam in 2014, citing a wish to have a more balanced distribution between vault locations rather than any single dominant risk. Poland and Hungary, both rebuilding reserve positions from a low…

Ingrid Sørensen · 14 min read

Industry · 28 July 2026

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

…ehold quantity of scrap is worth a few pounds, and informal processing is one of the more damaging sources of heavy-metal pollution worldwide. · Why don't manufacturers just design devices to be recycled more easily? Because disassembly cost is a real cost and gold recovery is a…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Craft · 22 July 2026

Hallmarks and Assay: How Anyone Proves Gold Is Gold

…s: 18ct is 750 parts per thousand gold. · Plating, filling and surface enrichment are the failure modes that surface-reading instruments miss. · Hallmarking regimes differ sharply by country, so an unmarked piece may be perfectly legitimate — or entirely unverified. · Negative-to…

Yusuf Demir · 15 min read

Industry · 2 July 2026

Nine Nines: Inside a Modern Gold Refinery

…t, which pushed the industry towards operators with the balance sheets to absorb an audit failure without going under. Third, and most simply, economies of scale in a thin-margin, high-volume business reward the largest players disproportionately. · Switzerland's outsized role ·…

Tomas Herrera · 19 min read

History · 9 August 2026

The Hoard Problem: What Buried Gold Actually Tells Us

…surviving hoard is, by definition, one that was never recovered — a sample biased towards failure, disruption and death. · The distinction between a savings deposit, an emergency burial and a votive offering is rarely visible in the metal itself; it is argued from context, and co…

Marguerite Adler · 16 min read

Markets · 8 August 2026

Moving Bullion: The Logistics Nobody Prices

…d, the London–New York spread widens; the dislocation is a logistics signal, not a market failure. · Sanctions and customs regimes can strand metal that is legally owned but administratively untouchable, which is a distinct risk from theft or fraud and is priced separately by ins…

Ingrid Sørensen · 15 min read

Markets · 17 August 2026

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

…tion and a rare joint statement from the exchange and major bullion banks. This was not a failure of the gold price; it was a failure of the 'paper' promise to be interchangeable with the 'physical' metal at zero cost. · The metal did not disappear and the promises did not break.…

Ingrid Sørensen · 23 min read

Markets · 18 August 2026

The Vault Beneath the City

…ir account by serial number, refiner, gross weight, fine weight and assay. This is the fundamental instrument by which an owner verifies that the metal recorded on their books corresponds to specific, identifiable physical objects rather than an abstract balance. Reconciling a ba…

Ingrid Sørensen · 22 min read

Markets · 2 August 2026

Who Actually Sets the Gold Price

…premiums in Shanghai, Mumbai and Istanbul are logistics and policy signals, not arbitrage failures. · Central banks and ETF flows move the price in opposite directions on different clocks: reserves are slow and price-insensitive, funds are fast and price-chasing. · Lease rates an…

Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read

Craft · 5 June 2026

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

…fabricate the shank from drawn stock, and join them. The buyer sees a single object; the failure statistics see two very different components. · The skills pipeline · The constraint on fine goldsmithing is not demand or metal. It is people. Training a setter or a raiser takes ye…

Yusuf Demir · 16 min read

History · 14 July 2026

The Gold Standard: How a Soft Yellow Metal Became Money

…mediately. The noble gases will not sit still in a purse. The alkali metals catch fire in damp air. Anything radioactive is self-evidently unsuitable. Iron and copper corrode; lead is soft and dull and, as the Romans learned slowly, poisonous. That leaves a small cluster of noble…

Marguerite Adler · 14 min read

Industry · 7 August 2026

How Fake Gold Is Detected

…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 penetrates only tens…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Markets · 11 September 2026

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

…hird of annual demand in recent years — rests on reported numbers. A genuine verification failure at a major holder would be a confidence event with few precedents; the market prices that possibility at roughly zero, which is itself a fact worth noting. · Start with a number that…

Ingrid Sørensen · 22 min read

Science · 8 August 2026

The Metal That Went Medical

…rface charge that keeps particles from clumping in storage, a leading cause of shelf-life failure. · Why a 'five per cent' shift matters A production run whose particles are five per cent larger than specification is not a minor deviation in this business. It moves the plasmon pe…

Amara Okonjo · 19 min read

Industry · 6 August 2026

The Scrap Trade

…weeks. When the price spikes, counters fill, and the additional metal reaching refineries damps the move; when the price falls, the flow dries up almost immediately. In some years recycling has supplied close to a third of total gold coming to market, without a single new hole be…

Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read

Craft · 3 August 2026

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

…. Because Asian buyers step back on rallies and step in on dips, physical demand tends to damp both directions. Sharp price moves are usually driven by investment and futures flows; the absorption that ends a sell-off is often physical. · What does a local premium or discount tel…

Yusuf Demir · 15 min read

Markets · 6 August 2026

Why Central Banks Started Buying Gold Again

…ional risk is deemed a worthwhile trade-off by many treasuries. The shift represents a fundamental move toward a more multipolar reserve system where physical assets play a larger role. · The Role of the Bank for International Settlements The BIS acts as a bridge between central…

Ingrid Sørensen · 14 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 · 17 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

Policies · 6 August 2026

Editorial Standards & Corrections

…orded. · 17. Coverage of individuals and reputational harm · Where reporting is likely to damage an identifiable person's reputation, we put the specific allegations to them in writing, in enough detail to allow a meaningful response, and we allow a reasonable period to reply — n…

Policies · 6 August 2026

Financial Disclaimer

…assage anywhere on this site reads as a recommendation to buy or sell, that is a drafting failure rather than an intention. Tell us and we will rewrite it. · 11. Forward-looking statements · Our reporting sometimes describes what market participants, analysts, companies or offici…

Policies · 6 August 2026

Terms of Use

…vision is severed to the minimum extent necessary and the remainder continues in force. A failure by us to enforce a provision on one occasion is not a waiver of the right to enforce it later. · These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy, the Cookie Notice, the Financial Discl…