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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 · 17 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 · 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. · Is there one o…

Ingrid Sørensen · 15 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 · 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. · What does a…

Yusuf Demir · 12 min read

Mining · 22 May 2026

The Other Supply Chain: Artisanal Mining and the Mercury Problem

…ction, it substitutes an acute hazard for a chronic one — and where cyanide is applied to tailings already contaminated with mercury, it can mobilise that mercury into a more transportable form. · Gravity first: it is the only intervention with no toxic downside and immediate rev…

Amara Okonjo · 12 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 · 15 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. · What is the difference between allocated and unallocated gold? Allocated gold is specific, serial-numbered bars held in custody for you and recorded on a weight list; it is your p…

Ingrid Sørensen · 17 min read

Industry · 4 August 2026

The Gold Inside Your Phone

…that must survive the field, connections that must be separable, and applications where a failure costs more than the entire metal budget of a factory. That residue is small, but it is unusually stable. · Why a designer ignores the gold price At a few dollars per handset, gold is…

Tomas Herrera · 15 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

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 · 16 min read

Industry · 28 July 2026

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

…the price moves sharply, jewellery scrap and industrial recovery flows rise within weeks, damping the move. That responsiveness is why refinery feedstock composition is a genuinely useful market indicator, and why refiners watch scrap arrivals the way a retailer watches footfall.…

Tomas Herrera · 13 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 · 13 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 · 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

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

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 selle…

Ingrid Sørensen · 15 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

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 · 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…