The Alchemy Is Real, the Economics Are Not
A company claims it can turn enriched mercury into gold.
The process uses the same kind of reaction that powers the sun.
The underlying physics works at the atomic level. Alchemists have dreamt about turning base metals into gold for about a thousand years.
The economics make no commercial sense at any scale.
In the company's own best case, one machine might produce 2 to 5 tons a year.
The world digs about 3 to 4 thousand tons of gold out of the ground every single year. A single plant running flawlessly would add a fraction of 1 per cent to annual supply.
No such plant exists. The number of fusion reactors working and making power anywhere on Earth today is zero. Without a functioning reactor, gold cannot be produced at any volume.
The Cost of Fake Gold
The enriched mercury required for the process costs about 15,000 dollars per milligram. A comparable weight of gold is worth about 14 cents. The raw ingredient costs about 100,000 times what the gold coming out of the machine is worth.
For a single gram to turn a profit, input costs would need to fall by five orders of magnitude. No plausible path to that reduction exists.
The Radioactive Wait
Gold produced by the process is radioactive. It must be locked in storage for 14 to 18 years before it could legally be sold. A gram manufactured today would sit in containment until the mid-2040s before regulators permitted its sale.
Why the Diamond Comparison Fails
An argument circulates on social media. Lab-grown stones destroyed the price of natural ones, so lab gold will do the same. The comparison rests on a misunderstanding of where each material's price comes from.
Diamonds were never genuinely scarce. In the 1930s, De Beers came to control around 85 per cent of the world's rough supply.
De Beers kept most of that supply off markets. Warehoused stones came out in a tiny trickle. The price stayed high.
In 1947, De Beers ran the campaign "a diamond is forever." The Western world came to treat a common lump of carbon as priceless. De Beers paired supply control with that slogan to fix prices the stone's abundance could never justify.
A process was developed to grow chemically identical diamonds in a factory at a fraction of the cost. Once a cheap substitute arrived, the illusion of scarcity collapsed.
Wholesale prices for lab-grown stones have fallen by 90 to 95 per cent since 2015. De Beers' parent company has written down 7 billion dollars on diamonds.
The lab gold story depends on conflating manufactured scarcity with the physical kind.
De Beers' rarity was a marketing decision and collapsed when a cheaper substitute appeared. No company on Earth controls how much gold the planet contains.
Gold traded as money for millennia before modern advertising existed. Gold's rarity is set by the earth's crust and cannot be undercut by a factory.
The very attempt to manufacture gold confirms its value, as no one attempts to counterfeit a worthless asset. A price above 4,000 dollars already reflects that scarcity.
What Central Banks Are Doing
Central banks have been buying gold at record pace year after year. Poland, Turkey, China, Russia and others feature among the buyers. Some analysts link the buying to a shift away from dollar reserves.
I argue that the fake gold story appeared at a convenient moment, serving to encourage selling while central banks accumulate. Governments whose debts have grown too large to ever be paid back honestly resort to creating new currency.
Every election reliably opens the spending taps. Each cycle adds borrowing layered on top of the last round. The bill arrives later, paid through savings being worth less.
The Inflation That Official Figures Obscure
Since 2000, what would have cost 100 hours of labour now costs 300. The real cost of a house or a car has tripled in 26 years. The global money supply has reached a record high, according to recent reporting.
The total amount of money in the system is growing at the quickest pace since Covid. Covid was itself the fastest expansion in human history.
Elections lead to more spending. Each round of borrowing leads to more currency creation. The dollar then loses purchasing power.
Gold's value as money rests on a physical constraint. No central bank can create more of it by decree.
Gold comes out of the ground slowly. Extraction demands energy, heavy machinery, physical risk and years of work.
Gold, Silver, and the Mining Pullback
Gold remains above 4,000 dollars and silver more than doubled inside a year before pulling back. When anything runs that hard, it pulls back as holders take profits. Many mining shares are down 20, 30, or 40 per cent from recent highs over just a few weeks.
In my view, the dip reflects gold being used as emergency cash. Countries whose cash flows dried up, probably in the Middle East, are selling the metal they bought for a rainy day.
The world digs 3 to 4 thousand tons of gold a year. No fusion plant adds to that figure today. Central bank demand continues, the money supply is expanding, and governments create new currency because their debts are too large to service honestly. No boardroom decision or government programme can change how much gold the earth's crust contains.