Gold

The quest for gold sounds like something from the past, but gold remains a highly prized and impactful resource within the global economy. From the insatiable demand for gold in the electronics that permeate our day to day, to the environmental desolation driven by gold mining in the Amazon, the gold trade continues to touch the lives and livelihoods of people across the world. In this book, Bloomfield and Maconachie tell the intriguing story of the yellow metal, tracing the seismic shifts in the industry over the last few decades. They explain how huge purchases of gold reserves by BRICS countries like China and Russia mark the shifting balance of power away from the West. And how rising affluence in India has led to a surging demand for gold jewellery, undermining attempts to make supply chains more responsible. Throughout the book, the authors suggest ways we could, collectively, make practices work better for the countless workers and communities who too often suffer at the producer-end of the supply chain. Linking local to global, producer to consumer, and gold’s extraction from the Earth to the financial centres that fuel it, this book offers a probing analysis that reveals who wins and who loses, and what this means for the future of gold.