In 1922 the gold market was restructured to exclude ordinary investors.

It started at the Genoa Conference when Britain and the US persuaded the world that their banknotes were “good as gold.”

A key move was to make the 400 oz ‘Good Delivery’ bar the international standard. These bars are too expensive and heavy for anything but institutional use. They weigh 12.5 kg and cost ~€1.53M last time I looked.

The image below shows 12,124 grams of fine gold.

Gold is flowing east. This proves the truth of Walter Wriston’s famous saying: “Money goes where it is treated best”

China’s official policy since 2004 has been ‘Storing Gold With the People’ … And buying patterns show that Chinese people buy vast numbers of 1 kg bars. Smaller units distribute wealth instead of concentrating it in institutions.

The image below shows 1,000 grams of fine gold. Current price €115,764.

For more than a century, the ever-expanding Western debt bubble has demanded that gold remained undervalued and misunderstood. The 400-ounce bar was designed to keep gold locked in bank vaults and out of your hands. Small bars solve that problem.

If poor households in India can save one gram at a time, any European or US investor can do the same.

The image below shows a one gram gold bar. Current price is around €118.

I write financial copy. That means explaining why someone should hand over money today in the hope of getting more money tomorrow.

That demands giving strangers the confidence to act … To click a button, sign up, enter credit card details, buy the product. Whatever a business asks its customers to do.

I have worked across asset classes, sectors and financial instruments.

Crypto, stock analysis, trader educators, financial media, crowd-investing, fund-raising, private equity, consumer debt, distressed debt, payments, tax software, gold royalties and streaming, gold mining, physical gold.

I work with all kinds of companies and institutions. From large and reputable to small and scrappy.

A band of trader-educators hired me, just as they were charged with serious financial crimes and fined tens of millions of dollars.

I have learned that many financial products are not very good. Maybe most of them.

Many will not do what the buyer expects, which is provide more money in the future for money today.

I do my best to write truth. So that narrows my options.

I promote financial instruments I believe will deliver. This reduces my options further. That is a good thing.

The Western debt-based system runs on promises, also known as credit or debt, and all the derivatives that can be spun from that.

Far too many promises have been made, and there is accelerating alarm that many will not be kept.

Most cannot, because is easier to make a promise than to keep one. Just as it is easier to borrow than to pay back.

I see collapsing faith in institutions, companies, governments, and systems. Unlike anything I have seen in my career so far.

People feel dread. They are more sceptical than ever of my clients’ ability to deliver on promises.

Gold is not a promise of value. It is value. The thing itself, not the promise of a thing.

It is pretty useless most of the time and can sit quietly in sock drawers and vaults for decades, even centuries.

Unchanged for millennia. When trust collapses, it shines.

Not much marketing needed.

You have seen the images: abandoned 55-gallon drums leeching radioactive waste into the environment.

This is unmarketing.

Those yellow barrels never existed, but the images tap into fears of nuclear waste spewing dangerous radiation for thousands of years. Poisoning the soil, causing cancer and mutated newborns.

Those fears were not accidental. They were stoked, very deliberately, to protect legacy energy systems and suppress a competing power source.

It has been going on, in the background, since I was a kid. I grew up with perception that nuclear energy was too dangerous to be used.

Across the Irish Sea lurked: Hinkley Point, Heysham, Windscale, renamed Sellafield because of an accident.

After the Fukushima disaster in 2011, perception worsened further. Many nations rejected nuclear energy. However, many of the perceived problems with nuclear power are actually problems with the first generation of reactors.

The economics of electricity generation are central to the debate. Meeting Net Zero emissions targets requires comparing technologies by energy return on investment.

EROI measures usable energy delivered from a source. It is the key metric for electricity economics. The minimum EROI required to sustain a modern society is around 7:1.

Traditional nuclear energy ranks among the highest, at 8–25:1, rising to roughly 750:1 for advanced nuclear technologies.

One uranium fuel pellet, about the size of a sugar cube, can deliver as much energy as one tonne of coal, 149 gallons of oil, or 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas.

Renewables are not ready to deliver the energy modern civilizations require at scale. Their lower EROI means continued reliance comes with lower standards of living in energy-intensive societies.

A global energy crisis is forcing governments to revisit anti-nuclear policies. This pivot points toward a nuclear renaissance driven by advanced reactor designs.

Advanced nuclear reactors improve safety and efficiency and aim to eliminate meltdown risk. Technologies include molten salt reactors, fast-breeder reactors, high-temperature gas-cooled reactors, and pebble bed reactors.

Nuclear power supplied about 9% of global electricity in 2024, with roughly 440 reactors operating across 32 countries. This is insufficient. The International Energy Agency calls for doubling nuclear capacity to 5,413 TWh by 2040.

The new reactors are safer, more efficient, and complementary to renewables.

The math is simple: without nuclear, Net Zero will remains out of reach forever.

Electric vehicle sales hit 17 million units globally in 2024, up 25% from 2023. The US crossed 1.5 million for the first time. China sold over 11 million EVs in 2024, accounting for nearly half of all car sales in the country.

Automakers made ambitious bets. Mercedes-Benz planned to produce only electric vehicles by 2030. General Motors aimed to follow by 2035.

Both have since reversed course.

>> Mercedes now expects only 50% electric and hybrid sales by 2030 and will continue making combustion engines “well into the 2030s.”

>> GM maintains its 2035 electric-only goal but missed its 2025 production targets and is reintroducing plug-in hybrids by 2027.

The retreat reveals a fundamental problem: the transition hit a materials wall.

Road transport accounts for more than 15% of global energy-related emissions. Electrifying it is central to every net-zero scenario, and by 2025, global EV sales are projected to exceed 20 million units, representing more than one-quarter of all cars sold worldwide.

Then came “Battery Bloat’.

This was a Catalyst Nobody Planned For. Battery Bloat across the industry means that EV batteries are getting bigger and require more lithium.

An EV battery contains around 8 kilos of lithium. Scale that to tens of millions of electric vehicles sold in coming years, and EV batteries could absorb more than 90% of the lithium supply by 2030.

The energy transition stopped being just a technology problem and added a materials problem.

The “lithium paradox” is that although there is a lot out there, there may not be enough.

Lithium scarcity looks odd at first glance. Lithium is the 25th most abundant element in the earth’s crust.

The problem is, it’s not concentrated in easily extractable deposits the way that oil, gold, or natural gas are.

The United States Geological Survey estimates that there are approximately 86 million metric tons of identified lithium resources globally. But only one-quarter is economically viable to mine.

Elon Musk has been talking about this bottleneck for years. The limiting factor on how fast the world can transition to sustainable energy is the rate at which we grow battery production:

“There is no raw material constraint. Lithium is one of the most common elements on Earth. It’s not so much the raw materials as it is converting the raw materials into the highly purified form that can be used in batteries. A tremendous amount of processing needs to happen, at scale comparable to the world oil and gas industry.”

The Problem

Global lithium demand is forecast to reach 2.4-3 million tonnes by 2030, up from around 1.15 million tonnes in 2024. Leading analysts predict supply deficits ranging from 300,000 to 768,000 tonnes by 2030, even if every announced project comes online.

Only a fraction of identified lithium resources are economically viable to mine. Converting raw lithium into battery-grade material requires industrial capacity comparable to the oil and gas system that the energy transition is meant to replace.

That capacity does not yet exist.

Insatiable demand for lithium creates an urgent need for increased mining. That in turn will require a huge increase in investment in lithium mining projects. The lithium industry needs an estimated $42 billion in new investment to meet 2030 demand.

Physics > Platitudes

Europe is learning harsh lessons on the dangers of policymakers setting targets without understanding the limits imposed by physical reality.

The EU’s proposed ban on sales of new petrol and diesel cars by 2035 was projected to create a five-fold surge in demand for lithium by 2030 to 550,000 tonnes per year.

Brussels set the deadline before anoyone checked if that amount of metal could relistically be mined.

The region’s production capacity will be only 200,000 tonnes, indicating a shortage that threatens to derail Europe’s EV transition.

This also represents potentially existential risk to the European auto industry, which cannot electrify future fleets without access to reliable and affordable lithium supplies.

Without that 350,000-tonne gap filled, assembly lines go dark and Chinese battery makers control the European market.

The stakes are clear: Whoever controls lithium controls the pace of electrification.

China Is Winning

The energy transition is not an abstraction that lives in spreadsheets and reports. It is physical. Lithium must be dug out of the ground, processed in refineries, and converted into battery-grade material through chemical treatments that take months.

China controls roughly 60% of global lithium refining capacity. Chile and Australia account for most of the remainder. The United States and Europe combined refine less than 3%.

The Inflation Reduction Act is a catch-up play. It encourages reshoring and friend-shoring, relocating processing back to the US and to geopolitical allies like Canada, Mexico, Australia, and Chile.

Bridging the lithium gap is now a prerequisite for the transition itself. The outcome will not be determined by forecasts or targets, but by which systems can secure, process, and sustain access to the underlying materials.

The race is on to develop lithium deposits and build out resilient supply systems.

Ancient Incas believed gold was the sweat of the Sun.

That might have seemed stupid until August 17, 2017, when astronomers detected two neutron stars colliding. Event GW170817 confirmed that most of the gold in the universe is created in kilonovas: when two neutron stars lock into a tight binary orbit and crash into each other.

Neutron stars are the collapsed remnants of supernovas. They are tiny and incredibly dense. A teaspoon of their matter would weigh billions of tons on earth (if you could get it to earth, which you couldn’t, because it would desttoy the earth). When neutron stars collide and explode, vast amounts of gold, platinum, and other heavy elements are flung out into space.

These elements form in milliseconds during the blast. Over billions of years, that material cools and condenses into clouds of gas and dust that form stars and planets. A minuscule fraction reached Earth.

Gold is unmistakably heavy in the hand.

That is because it contains a large number of protons (79) and neutrons (118) forced together in its nucleus. This requires extremely rare conditions, like neutron star mergers, which are estimated to occur roughly once every ten thousand years in a galaxy like ours.

Weight matters because physical systems stabilize around mass.

Gold became money because the universe made it impossible to fake.

Image above: Gold Mask, La Tolita culture, Ecuador, c. 500 BC to AD 500. Hammered gold, likely used in elite rituals or burials. Source: Casa de la Cultura, Quito, Ecuador.

The financial industry has grown gargantuan by selling any kind of instrument that can be thought up:

bonds, notes, derivatives, futures, forwards, ETFs, ETCs, options, structured products, SPACs, SAFEs, convertibles, perpetuals, stablecoins, staking yields. Stacked top of all this are endless layers of tokens, tranches, wrappers, and synthetics.

These are claims on future money. You could also call them promises. In short, you hand over your money today in hope, bet, expectation, or hope of more money tomorrow.

Promises are much easier to make than they are to keep. The incentive is always to create more and hope people don’t all ask for their money at once.

The gold market demonstrates this.

Physical gold is hard to find, mine, refine, mint, and store. But banks can create vast quantities of “paper gold” through derivatives, ETFs, and futures contracts.

That’s how Big Finance turns real things into fairy dust.

History shows the pattern: humans always make more promises than can be kept. Bubbles expand until they burst. Systems work until they don’t.

The dollar-based International Financial System still holds together.

It works because key players are all-in, so it’s in everyone’s interest to expect or hope that quadrillions in obligations can be met. The illusion holds as long as confidence does.

But confidence is weak glue.

Crashes, hyperinflations, and manias are psychological events that follow predictable arcs:

Optimism → Greed → Mania → Loss of Confidence → Fear* → Panic → Contagion → Collapse

*You are here.

A rising, volatile gold price signals we are accelerating from fear into panic. As panic turns to contagion, bank runs begin. People rush to swap paper and digital tokens for something more real. Credit gets crunched and currencies die.

These are the rare, but extreme scenarios gold owners try to hedge against.

Extremes are building: currency risk, geopolitical risk, systemic risk, counterparty risk, and growing financial instability.

What you cannot hold, you might not own.

The financial industry is built on promises. You give money today and hope to get more back tomorrow.

This doesn’t always work. Fred Schwed documented the tension in his 1940 book “Where Are the Customers’ Yachts?” A visitor asks to see the customers’ yachts and gets shown the brokers’ instead. The brokers get rich while the average investor loses despite following their advice.

Warren Buffett said: “Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls-Royce to get advice from people who ride the subway.”

I market financial assets. Many are questionable, so I avoid the products, companies and sectors that are designed to extract more value from customers than they provide.

Financial marketing gives people confidence to act or not act. This matters because most financial instruments aren’t very good.

Many are designed to benefit the seller more than the buyer.

Precious metals and commodities are different.

Gold is superior to most financial assets. Nature created it. It’s scarce and durable. You can’t type it into existence from Wall Street or the City of London.

A large percentage of the world’s population trusts physical gold more than promises made by governments or financial institutions.

Gold needs little marketing.