Development Time Has Become Gold's Scarcest Commodity
Gold does not need another reason to matter. At near record prices, the metal's case makes itself. The harder question for investors is narrower and more practical: which projects can turn ounces in the ground into something financeable, and ultimately into production. In a market this strong, that has become the real bottleneck, and it is not capital. The world's largest producers are sitting on record cash. What they are short of is replacement.For more than a decade, the largest producers have mined reserves faster than they have discovered and developed new ones. Discovery rates have ...