Gold Standards

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The Morning

Gold Standards

We explore a Times investigation into the gold market.

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Gold from a Colombian drug cartel mine.

Credit...

Federico Rios for The New York Times

By

Sam Sifton

I’m the host of The Morning.

April 27, 2026,

6:59 a.m. ET

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Investors buy gold when the world seems unstable — when people worry about stocks and inflation. A gold-buying frenzy has followed nearly every financial meltdown, major terrorist attack or war in the last 25 years.

Why? Gold is steady. It endures. It holds its value — indeed, its value grows. With conflicts raging in the Middle East, Ukraine and elsewhere, the price of gold now hovers around $5,000 an ounce. That is roughly four times what it was a decade ago.

And the United States is at the center of that marketplace:

Every year, the United States Mint sells more than $1 billion of investment-grade gold coins. Each is stamped with an icon like the bald eagle, signifying the government’s guarantee, required by law, that the gold is 100 percent American.

But that’s not true. “The Mint is actually the last link in a chain that launders foreign gold, much of it illegally mined,” according to

an investigation

by Justin Scheck, Simón Posada and Federico Rios:

The Mint buys gold that originates in a Colombian drug cartel mine. It makes Lady Liberty coins out of gold from Mexican and Peruvian pawn shops and from a Congolese mine that is part-owned by the Chinese government, records show. Some Mint gold has come from a company in Honduras that dug up an Indigenous graveyard for the ore underneath.

Guardrails that were meant to prevent human rights abuses in the mining of gold across the globe have collapsed. “As prices climb ever higher,” my colleagues write, “wealthy buyers are actually helping to create the very instability they are trying to hedge against.”

Image

Digging for gold in Colombia.

Credit...

Federico Rios for The New York Times

That instability is everywhere, they report. Gold mining funds the brutal civil war in Sudan and helped pay for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The high prices have helped both Venezuela and Iran survive financial sanctions. The biggest drug cartel in Colombia, the Clan del Golfo, mines gold and uses the proceeds to maintain its murderous control over swaths of the country. Terrorist groups are getting into the gold business, too.

But for decades the Mint has looked the other way as gold from foreign sources, some unethical or illegal, has entered its plant in West Point, N.Y., to be melted down and made into coins that are legally required to be made of U.S. gold.

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