The Jewellery Buyer Being Priced OutThin moat

For most of recorded history, jewellery was what gold was for. In 2025 jewellery consumption fell 18 percent to 1,542.3 tonnes and fabrication fell 19 percent to 1,638.0 tonnes, while the value of jewellery demand rose 18 percent to a record $172 billion¹.

Both halves of that are true and they say the same thing: the same money is buying much less metal. At an average price of $3,431 an ounce, up 44 percent, the Indian and Chinese households who have anchored physical gold demand for generations are buying lighter pieces, or waiting.

This is the demand that actually consumes gold, as opposed to the demand that stores it, and it is retreating at exactly the price level that makes Barrick's mines profitable. That combination should make an owner uneasy rather than comfortable. A price supported by investors and central banks accumulating a reserve asset is supported by sentiment about currencies and geopolitics; a price supported by people who want the metal is supported by income and demography. The first can reverse in a quarter.

The counterweight is that jewellery has behaved this way in every previous price spike and returned when prices stabilised, and that the value figure shows the appetite is intact even where the tonnage is not.

The number to watch is jewellery tonnage rather than value. Value rising while volume falls means the price is doing all the work, and it is the pattern that has preceded every previous gold correction.