A NEW CASE F0R $10,000 GOLD

COVID-19 Pandemic Adversely Impacts Gold Mining

- STEVE VOYNICK

Drilling a round at a Nevada open-pit mine; blasting this round will break a quarter-million tons of ore that grades about one gram of gold per tonne.

Among the many effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global economy is an adverse impact on the mine-supply side of the gold market. The pandemic has already curtailed gold exploration and gold-mine-development activities, as well as the production of existing gold mines—all factors to consider from the bigger perspective of “peak gold.”

“Peak gold,” a term that has been bandied about for decades, is again on the minds of metal-market analysts, economists, and metal investors.

Many believe that peak gold—now predicted to occur in 2024—will send the metal on its way to $10,000 per troy ounce or higher and open the door to the best gold-related investment opportunity since the 1970s.

Peak gold refers to the year when the annual world gold-mine production is maximized and will never again achieve that level. It marks the time when the gold supply begins to fall rapidly short of demand, and gold prices take off.

The concept of peak gold is a spin-off of Hubbert’s Peak Theory, which states that the production of nonrenewable resources follows a bell-shaped curve by climbing, peaking, and then going into terminal decline. Developed in the 1950s by the American geophysicist and geologist M. King Hubbert to predict petroleum production, this theory has since been applied to another nonrenewable resource—gold.