Co-CEO of the gold and silver refinery C. Hafner in Winsheim. Interview: Robert Piterek
"Inflation has led to a boom in gold"
Dr. Reisert, the price of gold has risen sharply over the course of this year. The coveted precious metal is now almost 30 percent more expensive than at the turn of the year 2023/2024. What is the background to the price jump?
The inflation of the last year and a half or two years has ensured that there has now been a real boom in demand.
At your gold and silver refinery C. Hafner, bars and ounces are cast from old jewelry. The jewelry is first melted down, cast into a bar and then the slag is removed. After analysis, these ingots are melted down again. Gold flakes are created by pouring the molten metal into cold water. These are then placed in the so-called aqua regia made of hydrochloric and nitric acid. Why do you do this?
Aqua regia is initially something wonderful. Aqua Regia dissolves the king of metals, gold. If we were to put the ingots directly into the aqua regia, it would take days for them to dissolve. But if we increase the surface area by adding flakes, the alloy dissolves much faster.
The end product is gold sand, which looks unspectacular but is extremely concentrated gold...
Yes, it doesn't look like gold at all. This is due to the surface structure, because gold sand does not reflect the light, but refracts it. But in our process we already have 99.99 percent gold. This is therefore fine gold, which we only have to granulate, i.e. melt, in order to be able to produce fine gold bars.
Now it goes back into the furnace. This process produces small gold nuggets, which are distributed more evenly when melted into bars. The bars are then cast, blasted and engraved. The result is a popular investment object that is particularly popular in Germany. Six percent of the world's gold reserves are stored here, only the USA has more. Why is that?
If you look at the last hundred years of German history, families and households have lost their entire wealth twice - through inflation, lost wars and currency reforms. That is ingrained in the DNA. That's why people here have a particularly strong affinity for securing their assets in gold.
INFO
This interview goes back to the program "Gold is more in demand than ever" from September 4, 2024 in the TV knowledge magazine Galileo on ProSieben. Further information in the TV report: In 2023, a third of all gold purchases were made by national banks to stabilize currencies and ward off inflation.
So is gold the best investment for your investment decisions in 2025?
Gold offers a safe haven in times of crisis. Experts advise private households not to invest all their assets in gold because there are other assets - such as shares - that generate better returns. In this country, the return on shares was five times higher than on gold in 2023. However, you should bear in mind that gold is tax-free when sold after one year, while a flat rate of 25% withholding tax applies to share sales.
Dr. Philipp Reisert
is Co-CEO of the gold and silver refinery C. Hafner, based in Winsheim, which specializes in the recycling of precious metals as well as products and services in the field of precious metal technology.
