In a move that analysts consider a bullish sign for the industry, four Chinese gold producers are battling over rights to develop the promising Yangshan Gold Mine. China now produces more gold than any other country, even South Africa, and the mine is rumored to be China’s largest gold bullion deposit.
Although full financial details have […]

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Photo Credit: No Dirty Gold (c) 2006.
Mining for gold isn’t always as pretty as that glimmering necklace or your favorite gold ring. “Customers don’t realize that one wedding ring weighs 10 grams and causes three tons of toxic waste,” says Greg Valerio, owner of ethical jewelry company Cred, which partners with the Colombia-based Green Gold Corporation.
We’ve all […]

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Gold, copper, silver, platinum, and zinc are a few of the metals that hide deep within the ocean floor and camp out in deep-sea vents. As hoards of precious metals plummet and the metals become scarcer, exploring and mining beneath the waves seems more commercially viable. British engineering company Soil Machine Dynamics is creating the […]

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You thought that platinum ring was expensive? Try Rhodium. At $9875 an ounce, even this somewhat obscure metal seems to be hitting an all-time-high, according to Resource Investor. Besides providing comic character Iron Man’s shrapnel sucking device (or whatever it is called), Rhodium plays a role in the jewelry industry. The plates, for example, in […]

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Platinum rarely garnishes as much attention as gold and silver, but since the beginning of this year, it has outperformed both in terms of price increases. Gold has gone up 5% and silver 13% – both more of a US dollar currency play than driven by any fundamentals — while platinum has risen 31% on the back of a […]

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Sorry in advance for my little geek-out today. This past weekend, I finally had the opportunity to catch Iron Man, and for those of you in the metals industry who have not seen it, you really must. Personally, I thought it was much better than Indiana Jones. But I couldn’t help running my little calculator in […]

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The summer has almost arrived, and wedding bells are ringing; flower girls are singing, and caterers and cakes and florists abound. People used to consider weddings an important time to splurge, lavishly spending money on that meaningful day. But with unstable economics, tighter budgets, and volatility in the precious metals arena, who wants to spend […]

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There’s a new type of event on the social scene: Gold parties.
Interested in throwing a party, but worried about costs? If a host wants to make money instead of spending it, a gold party allows them to convert unworn and unfashionable jewelry and knick-knacks into cool cash.
USA Today explains, “Rather than wait for bold gold to come […]

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I’m allergic to sesame seeds, so when I order a burger in a restaurant, I’m always in the hunt for a good bun substitute. So I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the current state of product substitutions in various metals markets. About a year ago, when nickel was trading at over […]

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Shame on me for betting against the dollar thinking that silver would do a little better than gold (provided that the dollar continued to poorly perform against other currencies). Both silver and gold are off for the reasons stated in my earlier piece (e.g. the Fed has indicated that the rate cutting may be at […]

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