City slickers grab their shovels

Matthew Lynn

Nostalgic about the internet bubble? Then why not join the new gold rush - for gold. If you do, though, prepare to shed tears before bedtime

In the past two decades, we have witnessed a series of what business journalists have called gold rushes. Computing and the microchip suddenly turned lots of geeks into millionaires. Then private-equity and hedge funds made mathematically inclined financiers into rich people. The biggest Klondike of all was the internet. That made millionaires out of just about everybody, if only for a few minutes. Now there's a new gold rush: gold. The hot talk in the City of London isn't of websites, bond issues or banking. If you want to get a financier excited, you need to talk geology, drills and me...