For half a century, gold was dismissed as a relic of a world without computers, central banks, or floating currencies — an asset that pays no interest, no dividend, and produces nothing. Then something changed. Starting in the early 2020s, the very institutions that manufacture modern money began buying gold at the fastest pace in more than fifty years, led by central banks in China, India, Turkey, Poland, and beyond. The New Gold Rush traces this quiet reversal from its origins in ancient Lydia and Rome's slow currency debasement, through the gold standard, the 1971 Nixon Shock, and the frozen Russian reserves of February 2022, to the record-breaking prices of today. Along the way, it explains how gold's price is actually set in London and New York, why mining a single gram can mean moving a ton of rock, and what drives central banks, savers, and a new generation raised on cryptocurrency to reconsider the oldest form of money. This is a book about trust, sovereignty, and what institutions do with their own reserves when they stop fully believing their own promises.
For half a century, gold was dismissed as a relic of a world without computers, central banks, or floating currencies — an asset that pays no interest, no dividend, and produces nothing. Then something changed. Starting in the early 2020s, the very institutions that manufacture modern money began...