Gold Stars All Round?

I think I may be developing a sixth sense...having blogged about gold and the new ethical standards, I now bring your attention to a Channel 4 Dispatches programme - The Real Price of Gold. This will be aired on Monday 27 June at 8pm and will presumably be available on the 4oD site soon afterwards. I am hopeful that Dispatches will do more thorough investigative journalism than Panorama last week, though of course this remains to be seen. Deirdre Bounds will be investigating the problems with identifying ethical gold and the loopholes to get around the voluntary standards. She will challenge shopkeepers knowledge of gold sourcing - which may be pretty pointless as there are few sales assistants that would do anything to prevent you from making a purchase. However, the reality is that few of us would willingly want to buy something that was "unfair" or "unethical".

Anyhow, it will be interesting, I hope that it will be accurate and fair. Anyone with a brain knows that a natural resource has come from the ground, so someone somewhere has had to dig it out and it wasn't the person wearing it, the key is how can we as consumers and investors work with organisations like the World Gold Council to reduce and ideally prevent "unethical practices". I hope that Deirdre offers some solutions as well as criticism. She certainly has the advantage of not being a journalist, but being a businesswoman that like me (and many others) believes that ethics and business do mix, indeed surely they must. She successfully built and ran an ethical travel business which she sold to a FTSE100 company. She has become a social entrepreneur and has started to inspire many people. The evidence would suggest that she is, the real McCoy or should I say honest Yorkshire lass? Oh and here is a video by GoldCorp, one of the holdings within portfolios via the Blackrock Gold and General Fund.