South Korean convenience store chain GS Retail is now rolling out gold bar vending machines at its locations, and they are proving to be a great hit among customers.
GS Retail, with nearly 14,000 branches all over South Korea, reported that it has already sold a total of $19 million worth of gold bars in the past nine months ending in May. The gold bars were introduced in September 2022 at five of its stores in five sizes, weighing between 0.13 ounces to 1.3 ounces.
“The most popular gold bar is the smallest, the 0.13-ounce one, which is currently priced at around $225,” said one representative of GS Retail to UPI News Korea, who added that the prices of the bars fluctuate daily in accordance with the current international valuations for gold. Nevertheless, this does not seem to deter many adult Koreans from making purchases.
“People in their 20s and 30s appear to be the main buyers, purchasing physical gold as an investment vehicle, especially in times such as these, when its value is continuing to rise,” the representative added. GS has rolled out 29 gold bar vending machines with plans to increase this number to 50 by the end of the year. (Related: Central banks continue their streak of accumulating more gold in 2023.)
Lee Eun-hee, a professor of consumer studies at the Department of Consumer Science at Inha University in Incheon, noted that the multiple economic crises occurring in the U.S. – including persistent inflation and the collapse of big banks like Signature Bank and Silicon Valley Bank – appear to have increased interest in anti-inflationary assets like gold.
“But a gold bar purchased at a convenience store seems more like something done in fun rather than as a means for serious investment,” she added. “I believe the popularity of these gold bars is mainly due to its easy accessibility, at convenience stores no less.”
SoKor’s central bank is more cautious in purchasing gold
However, the Bank of Korea (BOK) – South Korea’s central bank – is projecting a more cautious stance and has adopted a more careful approach to gold purchases, favoring the liquidity of the American dollar.
The BOK expressed concerns about the direction of gold prices, citing the potential peaking of gold values and the challenges associated with selling for liquidity purposes.
In its June report, the central bank highlighted the necessity of a cautious stance when considering an increase in the ratio of gold in foreign exchange reserves. The central bank currently holds 104.4 tons of gold in its reserves, representing approximately 1.14 percent of its total reserves.
In the early 2010s, Seoul’s central bank faced a major backlash after purchasing 90 tons of gold when prices peaked at more than $1,920 an ounce. Following years of lower prices, gold only surpassed those levels again in 2020.
At present, spot gold is trading at $1,963.20 an ounce. BOK Governor Rhee Chang-yong stated during a National Assembly session earlier this year that the bank has refrained from increasing its gold holdings since 2014 due to the prolonged low price of gold.
GoldReport.news has more stories on the growing demand for gold.
Watch the video below where ITM Trading’s Lynette Zhang talks about gold, T-bills, fraud and bartering.
This video is from the What is happening channel on Brighteon.com.
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- Gold price jumps to 8-month high, eventually settles above $1,900 level.
- MORE METAL: China’s public gold holdings now over 2000 tons after another huge purchase in December.
- Gold prices soar to 6-month high, widely expected to go higher in coming months.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
