Markets live and die on illusions of abundance. Central banks can conjure money with keystrokes, miners can flood the world with copper if demand and price are right, and shale rigs can be spun up almost overnight. But gold is the one market clock that refuses to speed up. It ticks at its own glacial pace: 1.7% annual growth, century after century, empire after empire. No policy, no discovery, no “quantitative easing of geology” can bend that hand forward. That is why gold, more than any other metal, has been humanity’s base layer of trust. It is not its scarcity that crowns it king—platinum and palladium are far ... (full story)