4 entries tagged gold. All writing.
OCTOBER 5, 2026 Gold Is Still Fixed Twice a Day. It Just Stopped Using a Phone. The London Gold Fix did not disappear. Since 2015 it has been an electronic auction at the same two times of day, run by an exchange company instead of five banks. Here is how the auction works, what the old fix was actually caught doing, and whether the new one can be spoofed the way JPMorgan spoofed gold futures. SEPTEMBER 30, 2026 The Great Power That Can't Use SWIFT "Our country can either be a great power, or it will not exist at all," Dmitry Medvedev told regional party officials on September 16. That's the Kremlin's own case for why the war continues — existential, civilizational, not up for negotiation. I wanted to know what that case looks like from the inside, and once I went looking, I found something more concrete than rhetoric sitting right next to it: $300 billion frozen, a payments system Russia no longer trusts, and a very specific, very measurable pivot toward crypto rails that started well before this month's headlines. SEPTEMBER 26, 2026 Four Thousand Tonnes and No API Central banks bought more than 4,000 tonnes of gold between 2022 and early 2026 — the largest sustained institutional accumulation in modern financial history — because it's a reserve asset nobody else's government controls. Bitcoin's pitch to the same reserve managers isn't replacing gold, it's being gold with an API: instantly portable, verifiable without an assay, settleable in ten minutes instead of a bonded shipment. This is a watching piece, not a verdict — I'll update it as the actual sovereign-reserve data moves rather than wait for a tidy ending. SEPTEMBER 26, 2026 Nine Hundred and Twenty Million, Paid in Cash A reasonable question keeps coming up: if CME can move Bitcoin's price with paper contracts, can it eventually undermine the 21 million cap the same way gold's paper market has allegedly floated free of physical reality for decades? The honest answer needs two separate facts held apart — what CME's contracts actually settle in, and what a real bank actually got caught and fined $920 million for doing to gold.