Gold Is Flying High, but Getting Harder to Mine

Gold last traded at $2,006 an ounce. Silver at $28.10 an ounce.

NEWS SUMMARY: Precious metal prices rose further Tuesday on bargain-hunting and ongoing dollar weakness. U.S. stocks traded lower as new pandemic stimulus hopes for an agreement dimmed amid growing political tensions.

 Wall Street Journal---"Gold miners are riding high as the metal trades at record prices, but digging it out of the ground is getting harder.... Gold is among the rarest metals in the earth's crust and much of the easier-to-get ore has already been mined. What is left is harder to find and more expensive to extract, miners say. While that isn't an immediate worry, with gold prices hitting $2,000 an ounce for the first time this month, miners face the longer-term prospect of higher costs and drilling in less hospitable places....Gold prices are up around 28% this year. Miners have used the rally to pay down debt and increase dividends, rather than start new projects, with executives wary of repeating their costly overexpansion during the last big run-up in prices. 'We are definitely past peak gold,' said Mark Bristow, chief executive of Barrick Gold Corp., the world's second-largest gold miner by market capitalization. He estimates that the new metal added to miners' reserves since 2000 replaces only half of the gold they mined in that period....The grade of gold being mined - the amount of metal for every ton of rock mined - is also getting worse. The average mine grade has fallen from over 10 grams a ton in the early 1970s to around 1.46 grams a ton last year, according to Metals Focus, a precious-metals consulting firm....All the gold ever mined can fit into a 69-foot cube, according to the World Gold Council."