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Previously on Red Pilled.

America, diamonds were not valuable because they were rare.

They were valuable because they were controlled.

Central banks don't store what's fashionable.

They store what works when everything else breaks.

And during the onset of the Great Depression, the smart money began accumulating gold.

European orders from de Beers for industrial diamonds began to climb, and Oppenheimer understood what that meant.

These orders are not the actions of nations preparing for peace.

They're preparing for war.

Industrial diamond orders became a proxy for war preparation.

Scientists at the General Electric Company achieved something that until then had been considered impossible.

They created a diamond in a laboratory.

I'm Patrick Carelci and.

I'm Adriana Cortes.

And this is Red Pilled America, a storytelling show.

This is not another talk show covering the day's news.

We're all about telling stories.

Stories.

Hollywood doesn't want you to hear stories.

The media mocks stories about everyday Americans at the Globalist ignore.

You can think of Red Pilled America as audio documentaries, and we promise only one thing, the truth.

Welcome to Red Pilled America.

It's a cold night in Brussels, January nineteen ninety two, and inside the Royal Windsor Hotel, two men sit across from one another at a small dining table.

To anyone watching, this looks like nothing more than a routine business dinner, a supplier and a customer sharing a meal.

But this quiet dinner will become Exhibit A and one of the most consequential antitrust cases in modern industrial history.

At the table sits Peter Friends, a sales manager for General Electric's industrial diamond division.

Across from him is Philip l'otier, a business executive at Diamont Boert, one of the world's largest buyers of industrial diamonds.

On paper, Diamont Boert looks like just another European company, but behind the scenes, it is something more.

It's owned in part by Debier's consolidated minds, the same company that's had a monopoly on engagement ring diamond for over a century.

But this night isn't about romance.

It's about industrial diamonds, the rough, gravelly stones used for grinding steel and shaping the modern world.

At some point during the meal, low Tier quietly slides a list of upcoming de Beer's price increases for industrial diamonds.

The ge man Peter Friends, takes out a pen and writes the numbers down.

Moments later, Friends leaves the table, then walks to a fax machine, and he sends those numbers straight to General Electrics headquarters in Ohio.

Within days, General Electric raises its own prices in near perfect alignment with Debier's, and the result across the world, the price of industrial diamonds rises, not because of scarcity or increased demand, but because the two companies that control roughly ninety percent of the global market moved together in silence.

To the US Department of Justice, this was textbook collusion, two dominant players sharing pricing information then coordinated action a cartel dinner hidden in plain sight.

But what makes this moment so extraordinary isn't just the potential illegality.

It's the irony, because General Electric and De Beer's were never supposed to be allies.

In fact, they began as mortal enemies.

We're at the finale of our series of episodes entitled what makes something Valuable?

We're looking for the answer to that question by telling the story of Diamond Powerhouse to Beers, so.

To pick up where we left off in our last episode.

By the early nineteen fifties, de Beers had done something no company in history had ever accomplished.

It had taken a stone once reserved for kings and turned it into a universal symbol of love.

Diamonds had defeated pearls.

They had conquered Hollywood and embedded themselves into marriage status, aspiration, and identity itself.

A proposal without a diamond felt almost illegitimate, And behind that cultural victory stood a the corporate reality that was just a staggering.

By the mid nineteen fifties, de Beers controlled more than ninety percent of the world's diamond supply, and not just gem quality stones, glittering in jewelry cases, rough imperfect industrial diamonds that powered the modern world as well.

These were the stones that cut steel, drilled through rocks, and shaped aircraft parts, tank armor, jet engines, oil wells, and precision weapons.

They were the hidden backbone of the twentieth century industry, and prior to the mid nineteen fifties, de Beers controlled them all.

This was the part of the diamond Empire.

Few consumers ever saw the central selling organization, the enforcement arm of the de Beer's cartel, didn't just regulate glamour.

It regulated factories, supply chains, and manufacturing timelines.

If you wanted industrial diamonds, you went through de Beers.

There was no alternative, and for most of the world that monopoly was accepted as simply the cost of doing business.

But further the United States, that condition was intolerable.

America had no diamond mines, no domestic supply, no independent leverage.

Every drill bit, grinding wheel, and position tool that relied on diamond abrasives came from a foreign cartel controlled by de Beers, a cartel headquartered in Southern Africa with deep ties to Britain and no obligation real or moral to American national interests.

During World War II, this dependency had already made US planners deeply uncomfortable.

Diamonds were strategic in war.

They were used to machine tank parts, shape aircraft engines, and manufacture weapons with tolerances measured in thousands of an inch, and yet the United States had been forced to rely on a monopoly it did not control.

To Washington, this was more than a market issue.

It was a national security problem.

And as the World War II fighting intensified, de Beers made clear where its priority stood.

Britain, the heart of the Empire, came first.

Everyone else the United States noticed.

American officials grew increasingly uneasy as they watched a foreign cartel dictate the flow of a material essential to wartime manufacturing.

Requests for transparency were met with deflection.

Inventory levels were treated as proprietary secrets.

Allocation decisions were made behind closed doors in London and Johannesburg.

From Washington's perspective, the situation was intolerable.

Then came the rumors.

Intelligence reports began to surface that millions of carrots of industrial diamonds were finding their way to Nazi occupied Belgium.

Belgium had long been a center of diamond industry, but under German control, any material flowing through Antwerp was by definition serving the access war effort.

To American analysts, that implication was unavoidable.

There was only one entity that controlled large stockpiles of diamonds to beer.

US intelligence tracked one smuggling operation into occupied territory, but when investigators tried to follow the trail further back towards the mines.

It vanished.

The supply chain dissolved into shell companies, intermediaries, and deniable transactions.

Nothing could be conclusively proven, but suspicion hardened into belief.

American officials pressed Britain to investigate to Beers directly.

Britain declined.

Instead, they suggested a so called security review be performed.

The experts that would be selected to conduct it would be mining engineers and diamond specialists, all approved by the head of de Beers himself, Sir Ernest Oppenheimer.

To Washington, the approach looked less like an investigation and more like a performance trust collapsed.

Internal memos from the era described throwing alarm amongst defense planners.

One conclusion surfaced again and again in classified discussions in the next war, the United States could.

Be cut off entirely.

De Biers controlled a choke point for diamonds.

This was not paranoia, it was math.

If De Beers chose to restrict shipments or redirect them, the US industrial machine would grind to a halt within months.

Aircraft production would slow, tooling precision would degrade.

Weapons manufacturing would suffer cascading failures.

A modern army, it turned out, could not function without diamond dust.

As the war wound down, the message in Washington was clear.

The United States could never again allow a foreign cartel to control a material so central to national defense.

The war ended in nineteen forty five, but the unease did not the same year, the US Justice Department finally moved against the diamond cartel.

A formal antitrust case was filed against De Beers, accusing it of monopolizing the global diamond trade, including in still diamonds vital to American defense, but the case collapsed almost immediately.

De Beer's had no offices on US oil, no executives within reach of American courts, and no assets the government could seize.

So Washington changed their tactic.

If it couldn't break the cartel through the courts, it would break its leverage through science.

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So by the end of World War Two, the US Justice Department filed an antitrust case against a Beers, accusing it of monopolizing the global diamond trade, including industrial diamonds vital to American defense.

But the case collapsed almost immediately.

De Beers had no offices on US soil, no executives within reach of American courts, and no assets the government could see.

So Washington changed their tactic.

If it couldn't break the cartel through the courts, it would break its leverage through science.

In the late nineteen forties, the US government quietly began laying the groundwork for a domestic alternative.

The same wartime research apparatus that had produced radar, jet engines and the atomic bomb was repurposed for a new mission.

The Office of Scientific Research and Development and its successor agency began pouring money into fundamental material science.

High pressure physics, carbon crystallization, metallurgy at extreme temperatures, all components needed to theoretically make diamonds in a lab, Scientists experimented with massive presses capable of exerting pressures found only deep inside the Earth.

They toyed with graphite behavior under heat and stress, and designed furnaces that could hold temperatures high enough to force carbon atoms into new arrangements.

Inside the Pentagon, industrial diamonds were formally classified as a critical material.

Internal mammals warned that foreign controlled supply chains were unacceptable, that reliance on a single overseas cartel posed an existential risk, and quietly American corporations were encouraged to act.

Companies like General Electric GE had the engineers, capital and laboratories, and now they had a mandate reduce dependence onto beers, create a domestic source of industrial diamonds, and break the choke point.

Sometime in the early nineteen fifties, GE launched what it called the Super Pressure Project, a secret internal program aimed at doing what no one had ever done before, produced diamonds without minds.

At first, even insiders weren't.

Sure it was possible.

Diamonds weren't just carbon.

They were carbon arranged in a very specific lattice, forged under crushing pressure and intense heat over a long geological time.

But that was the old assumption.

What if nature's timetable could be accelerated, the Earth's mantle recreated in a machine, general election should pursue the answer to these questions, and by the mid nineteen fifties they had a breakthrough.

In nineteen fifty four came a landmark in Man's search for knowledge about his world.

Scientists of the General Electric Company in the United States produced man made diamond for the first time.

Inside GE's secret super pressure project, scientists subjected ordinary carbon graphite to conditions that until then existed only deep inside the Earth pressures, approaching sixty thousand atmospheres temperatures above fifteen hundred degrees celsius.

They combined carbon with metal catalysts and forced it violently into a new form.

The result was a crystal with the same atomic lattice as a natural diamond, the same hardness and structure, the same fundamental identity.

These were not diamond imitations.

There were diamonds, but they were not diamonds for engagement rings.

They were small, rough, and granular.

They were industrial diamond.

And that distinction mattered because for decades the beers had treated industrial diamonds as an afterthought, a byproduct of gem mining.

Now, for the first time, a company outside the cartel could produce diamonds on demand.

De Beers didn't yet realize it, but the era of a diamond being forever quietly began to crack.

For the first time since Cecil Roads consolidated the diamond fields of South Africa, de Beers did not control all diamond supply.

A US based corporation could now produce diamonds without asking permission from the Earth or from the De Beer's cartel, and Ernest Oppenheimer understood immediately what that meant, because even though these early synthetic diamonds weren't suitable for jewelry, they attacked the monopoly at its most sensitive point.

Control.

Diamonds had always drawn their power from scarcity, from the idea that they were rare, that they arrived only on nature's timetable.

Had just demonstrated that this was no longer true, at least not for industrial use.

And once that spell was broken in machine shops, it was only a matter of time before the question arose, if diamonds can be made for industry, why not for jewelry.

De Beers understood the danger immediately, and it quietly began making synthetic diamonds itself.

Ernest Oppenheimer died in nineteen fifty seven, but unlike when Rhoades passed, there was no power vacuum.

The cartel transitioned smoothly from founder to air.

Ernest's son, Harry Oppenheimer, was already deeply embedded in the business before his father's death.

He became chairman of Anglo American in nineteen fifty seven, and three years later chairman of de Beers, with Harry at the helm.

In the nineteen sixties, de Beers launched its own high pressure, high temperature research programs, the same basic approach ge had pioneered.

Over time, this secretive research arm would formalize into a company with an almost ironic name, Element six, reference to carbon's position on the periodic table, the building block of diamonds.

By the nineteen eighties, you would have thought these two behemoth companies would have been locked in a brutal zero sum war.

On one side, to Beers, a century old cartel that had mastered scarcity, psychology and control.

On the other hand, General Electric, the American industrial giant that had learned how to manufacture diamonds, but the two weren't at war.

The two companies instead circled each other cautiously, almost respectfully.

As the eighties came to a close, the battlefield had stabilized, not into free competition, but into something colder, a duopoly.

Together, ge and de Beers controlled roughly ninety percent of the industrial diamond market.

They did not need to fight openly.

In fact, fighting would be disastrous.

If either side flooded the market too aggressively, prices would collapse.

Stability became more valuable than victory, and so without formal treaties or public agreements, the industry settled in to a tense equilibrium, two giants, one market, and a shared interest in keeping diamonds natural and synthetic expensive.

The two companies learn to move carefully, to watch each other, and eventually to align, which brings us back to Brussels in January nineteen ninety two, at the Royal Windsor Hotel, in a polished dining room, with two men sitting across from each other at a small table, the ge man Peter Friends, and the executive connected to De Beer's Peter Lotier.

After dinner, Friends takes de Beer's upcoming price increases and faxes those prices directly to GE's headquarters in Ohio.

Within days, General Electric raises its own industrial diamond prices in parallel with de Beers to the US Justice Department.

This is textbook price fixing, and in nineteen ninety four federal prosecutors make their move.

General Electric is indicted, so is Debier's, though only on paper because de Beer's refuses to appear in U s Court g egos to trial.

Its defense is technical, careful, and narrowly successful.

Prosecutors cannot prove that the corporation itself knowingly directed collusion without access to Deber's internal records unreachable.

As long as Debier's remains outside US jurisdiction, the case weakens.

General Electric is eventually acquitted, but Debier's remains under indictment, and the consequences are immediate and lasting for years afterward.

Debier's executives avoided traveling to the United States, entirely knowing they could be arrested the moment they landed.

The cartel that once operated visibly, confidently and above scrutiny, was now exposed.

Russia was beginning to sell outside the cartel.

Canada was developing an independent diamond supply, Australia was moving its stones off the de BER's pipeline, and far more dangerous than any newly discovered mind technology was accelerating.

The indictment over Brussels didn't end the diamond cartel, but it marked the moment when its powers stopped being absolute.

De Biers was no longer the unquestioned master of the diamond world.

It was a company under pressure from governments, from competitors, and from science itself.

In two thousand, the once head of de Bers, Harry Oppenheimer, passed away.

His son, Nicki Oppenheimer, had taken over De Beers two years earlier, and he did something unthinkable.

The same year his father died.

Niki started to dismantle the cartel model, the very system that had made to Bers powerful.

Cecil Roads built the monopoly, or Nestoppenheimer perfected the cartel, Harry Oppenheimer preserved it, and Nicki Oppenheimer dissolved it.

After more than a century of single channel control, De Beers officially ended the central selling organization's dominance over global diamond distribution.

In its place, to Beer embarked on a new strategy, one that sounded almost mundane by comparison.

It would become a normal company by competing, marketing, and selecting partners instead of commanding obedience.

This was not evolution, it was retreat.

The cartel was over in two thousand and one, De Biers was taken private.

Ownership was consolidated among three key players, Anglo American, the Oppenheimer family, and the government of Botswana.

Removed from public markets, de Beers could restructure quietly without shareholder's scrutiny and prepare for a future no longer built a monopoly.

But there was another motive.

For decades, De Biers had avoided the United States, unwilling to subject itself to antitrust enforcement.

Now, with the cartel effectively dismantled, the company needed to clean up its legal exposure.

That meant resolving its long running conflict with the US Justice Department.

De Biers ultimately settled its anti trust issues, paying millions in fines and accepting restrictstions that cleared a path for limited re entry into the American market.

The company that once dictated terms to governments was now negotiating permission.

And then came the final signal.

Of what was really happening in the diamond industry.

In twenty eleven, the Oppenheimer family, the dynasty that had transformed to beers into the most successful cartel in modern history, sold its remaining stake to Anglo American.

Just like that, the family that had ruled the diamond world for nearly a century was gone.

To some, it looked like a simple business decision, but to the more discerning watchers it appeared to be foresight because by twenty eleven, the pressures that had cracked the cartel were no longer peripheral.

They were central.

Labs that synthesized diamonds were improving.

Detection between natural and lab grown diamonds was getting harder.

Consumers were beginning to ask uncomfortable questions.

If lab grown diamonds are chemically diamonds and experts can't easily tell them apart, aren't they just real diamonds?

The forever diamond illusion that had held for one hundred years was still standing, but it was no longer.

Stable, and the people.

Who knew at best were getting out.

Because you see, the Oppenheimers knew that scientists had made a breakthrough forty years earlier, and that breakthrough was finally becoming economically viable.

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Welcome back to Red Pilled America.

In the early nineteen seventies, Deep inside General Electrics labs, something quietly extraordinary happened.

GE scientists succeeded in producing something new.

Not dark, opaque diamonds for grinding wheels, but gem quality diamond perfectly crystalline, chemically identical to stones pulled from Earth, the kind of diamonds that were mounted on engagement rings and branded as Forever.

The BBC reported on g's breakthrough in nineteen seventy.

Although industrial diamonds have been manufactured before, this secret recipe will produce the world's first synthetic gem diamonds.

Graphite granules are squeezed and fused into a pure, unmarked diamond crystal, and they claim that it's fit for the brow of a prince or the left hand of a pretty girl.

It was a stunning moment, and yet the diamond cartel didn't feel it.

Because there was a catch, actually several.

First, the process was staggeringly expensive.

The stones were still small, typically around a carrot or less, and producing them required enormous energy, massive presses, and extreme temperatures.

In other words, g could make gem diamonds, but at a cost so high that they posed no immediate threat to the natural diamond business.

At the time, even optimists believed these stones would remain scientific curiosities, too expensive, too limited, and too impractical.

The illusion of diamond scarcity remained intact.

But by the nineteen eighties that illusion began to weaken, not publicly but technically, because GE wasn't alone anymore.

Multiple actors had cracked the same basic problem Deber's own research teams, Soviet and later Russian labs, as well as Japanese and European material scientists.

All of them could now produce gem quality diamonds in a lap, not cheaply, but reliably.

High quality Yellow diamonds in particular, became easier to manufacture and quietly without fanfare.

Some of these stones began to slip into the market, occasionally mixed with natural diamonds, and passed along without disclosure because no doubt, some unscrupulous people in these labs knew that detection was becoming difficult Under a jeweler's loop.

Many of these stones were indistinguishable from natural diamond.

Synthetic gems existed, but they were niche.

The public remained unaware.

The diamond myths survived another decade, but in the nineteen nineties the quiet trickle became a stream.

Russian labs expanded their high.

Pressure, high temperature production.

They created more stones and lab facilities, and those lab gems began to cross their borders.

The number of players capable of producing gem quality synthetics grew, and with each new lab, the costs to produce gem quality diamonds began to shrink.

Diamonds, once defined by geological rarity, were becoming a manufactured product, not yet mass market or.

Cheap, but no longer unique.

The lesson from pearls loomed in the background.

Cultured pearls hadn't destroyed natural pearls overnight.

They had done something subtler and far more devastating.

They had eroded exclusivity, and diamonds were now walking the same path.

The technology existed, as did the capability all that remained was scale.

In the late nineteen nineties, just as Nicky Oppenheimer was taking the helm of de Beers, a small Silicon Valley based company called Apollo Diamond began experimenting with a radically different method of diamond creation, not crushing carbon under impossible pressure, but growing it.

The process was called chemical vapor deposition or CVD, and here's how it worked.

A tiny sliver of diamond, no bigger than a grain of salt, was placed inside a sealed chamber.

Carbon rich gases were pumped in, energy was applied, and then slowly, layer by layer, atom by atom, diamond began to grow, not as random crystal, but as a single, continuous lattice.

This wasn't imitation, This was carbon arranging itself into the exact same structure as natural diamond.

Like pearls, the rarity of diamonds was always vulnerable because it was a chemical problem.

Again, unlike gold, which is a nuclear problem.

Remember, for gold, you must change the number of protons in an atom.

It can technically be done betted up to a billion dollars per ounce.

There is no chemical shortcut.

But diamonds, on the other hand, form under chemical processes that humans can replicate much easier than a nuclear process.

At first, Apollo Diamond stayed silent.

They quietly filed patents, refined their techniques, and improved clarity and consistency.

By the early two thousands, they were producing near colorless gem grade diamonds, the kind that could be set into jewelry, at a price that started to compete with the mining costs of natural diamonds.

The company tried to keep the breakthrough quiet, but in two thousand and three US leaked.

A tiny diamond seed is fused with carbon and heat and grows into a full fledged gem, something it takes millions of years to do in nature.

Lab grown gem quality diamonds were no longer theoretical.

They were here.

In two thousand and four, Apollo Diamond made its announcement public.

They had successfully grown single crystal near colorless CBD diamonds stones suitable for engagement rings.

Now they could be done at a much cheaper cost than with the high pressure, high temperature technique developed in the nineteen fifties.

This was the moment everything changed.

This wasn't a finite amount of diamonds found in some new mine in South Africa.

It was an infinite supply.

Gem quality diamonds were no longer constrained by nature.

They were constrained only by energy, equipment, and economics, and that meant something terrifying for an industry built on scarcity.

As lab grown producers began marketing their stones, some used a phrase that sent a chill through the diamond world, cultured diamonds.

I think conventional wisdom would say that diamonds.

Only come from the ground, and that notions It's not true.

The company calls the creations cultured diamonds, like cultural pearls.

The use of the phrase wasn't an accident.

It was deliberate because everyone in the gem trade knew what it happened to pearls.

Diamonds and pearls failed because they lacked true scarcity, especially now that they can make diamonds and pearls.

That's Kevin de Merritt, founder of Lear Capital, one of the world's premiere precious metal companies.

So gold and silver can't be manufactured.

Every ounce on Earth came from a fian Nite geological process that took millions of years.

Mining is expensive, slow, and increasingly difficult, so it gets more expensive over time and even with modern technology, global gold supply grows at about one or two percent a year.

The economy grows faster than that.

When you have this slow rate of being able to pull it out of the ground and it's scarce and it's finite, that's what's going to create the value here.

You can grow a pearl in a lab, you can grow a diamond, and lab you can't grow gold.

Cultured pearls had looked identical to natural ones had flooded the market, and they had permanently destroyed the aura and the price of natural pearls.

Now the same.

Language was being applied to diamonds, and the implication was obvious.

If pearls could be grown and diamonds could be grown, then what exactly was a natural diamond worth.

The traditional diamond industry pushed back hard.

They insisted on a different word, synthetic, because years earlier, the diamond cartel had successfully fended off another gem using this same argument.

Cubic zirconia or CZ is a laboratory created crystal that can be manufactured cheaply, consistently, and ats scale.

It was developed in the late nineteen seventies but had a big cultural moment in the eighties.

Visually, it checked many of the boxes that mattered.

To consumers, It sparkled, it caught the light, and to the untrained eye, it looked a lot like a diamond.

Jewelry companies embraced it quickly.

They became ubiquitous almost overnight, and sales exploded across mass market jewelers.

Cubrick Zirconia didn't just sell, it normalized the idea that a diamond look alike was acceptable.

And yet despite all that, cubic zirconia did not collapse the diamond market, not even close, because everyone knew what it was and was not.

Cubrick Zirconia was never presented as a diamond, It was never chemically identical, It was never marketed as the real thing.

Instead, it occupied a very specific cultural lane.

Cubic Zirconia became shorthand for imitation, fake bling.

The distinction was clear, and de Beers made sure it stayed that way.

Diamonds were framed as real, cubrick zirconia as synthetic, and the public accepted that boundary without much resistance.

But beneath the surface, cubric zirconia revealed something important.

It proved that there was enormous pent up demand for the look of diamonds, even without the geology, the romance, or the mythology.

If a product could one day deliver diamond sparkle and diamond chemistry at scale, the rules would change.

The Oppenheimer's knew that day arrived.

When Apollo Diamond began creating lab grown gem quality diamonds for jewelers.

The situation was deeply unsettling.

Even under a jeweler's loop that common one eye magnifying glass, they couldn't tell the difference.

As one jewel expert put it.

I couldn't distinguish which one is men made and the natrol.

To distinguish lab grown from natural diamonds, he needed advanced equipment, spectroscopy, fluorescence analysis, high end imaging machines, tools found in laboratories, not jewelry counters.

This was nothing like Cubric's or conia.

These were diamonds.

The illusion that had held for a century that diamonds were rare because nature made them rare was now really cracking.

The Oppenheimers knew exactly where this story ended.

They had seen it before with pearls, which is likely why they sold their Deber's shares in two thousand and eleven.

By then, lab grown diamond manufacturing had quietly entered its mass production phase.

Facilities in China, India, Russia, and the United States scaled up, output costs dropped, yields improved, stones got larger, clearer, and more consistent, and consumers were beginning to notice the pitch was irresistible.

The same diamond chemically identical at a discount price.

In twenty eighteen, lab grown diamonds cost about twenty percent less than natural grown diamonds.

Consumers on a budget began turning to lab grown gems.

The shift was undeniable, and that same year Debiers did something unthinkable.

It entered the lab grown gem quality market itself.

The company that had spent more than a century defending diamond scarcity launched its own lab grown brand.

They called it light Box.

The move stunned jewelers.

Light Box diamonds were sold at a flat price eight hundred dollars per care it regardless of clarity, color or cut.

No grating, mystique or romantic language like forever was added, just a price, and the messaging was surgical.

Light Box diamonds were positioned as fun, playful fashion jewelry, not engagement rings or heirlooms or investments.

The strategy was clear.

If lab grown diamonds couldn't be stopped, they would be devalued.

Debiers wanted to crash the price, strip the romance, and frame them as disposable like cubic zirconia, all to preserve natural diamonds as the only stones that truly mattered.

It was a calculated gamble, and in the short term it worked.

Lab grown diamond prices collapsed forty percent almost overnight.

But what debiers could not contain was the psychological spillover, because once consumers accepted that lab grown diamonds were real diamonds, not fake like cubic zirconia, the price gap became impossible to ignore, and the shock didn't stop with lab grown stones, it bled into the natural market.

Between twenty eighteen and twenty nineteen, polished natural diamond prices fell roughly ten percent, then another fifteen percent.

For the first time since the cartel era.

The market was behaving like a market, a luxury category, responding to supply, substitution and price pressure.

Then came acceleration.

By twenty nineteen, lab grown diamond production was doubling year over year.

Retailers began openly promoting lab grown engagement rings not as alternatives, but as smart choices.

In twenty twenty, the pandemic pushed diamond shopping online, where price comparisons were unavoidable and romance was filtered through spreadsheets.

Younger buyers, raised on transparency not tradition, began choosing size and value over narrative.

By twenty twenty two, lab grown diamonds accounted for roughly half of all US engagement rings by unit volume, and by twenty twenty three, wholesale lab grown diamond prices had fallen to around three hundred dollars per carrot, down from thousands just five years earlier.

The illusion was gone.

The following year, the reckoning arrived.

Natural diamond prices fell hard.

One carrot stones dropped by roughly fifty percent from their peak three carrot and larger stones fell by as much as seventy percent.

The stone that had been sold as forever was now behaving like what it had always been beneath the marketing, a discretionary luxury good, not a store of value or airloom guaranteed to endure it was a product again Kevin de Merit of lear Capital.

Gold and silver really possessed this rare combination of traits that really no other material has ever matched simultaneously.

And you know, they're six or seven of them.

Durability, you know, gold or silver, they don't rot, they don't rush, they don't decay.

Fungibility, one ounce is identical to the other, exactly the visibility.

They can be melted and reformed without losing value.

Portability, enormous value in an incredibly small space, especially at today's prices.

It's globally recognizable, it's instantly recognizable across cultures, different countries, so on and so forth, and it's naturally scarce.

It can't be created or manufactured.

And then you have this faith in demand.

From the beginning of time, there was the gold rush, and people, you know, demanded this goal.

They would come all the way out and risk their lives to the West coast to try to dig up some gold.

So when you have all of that together that no other material has, that's really what's unique about the gold and silver market.

In my opinion, diamonds and pearls failed because they lack fungibility, They lack true scarcity.

Each one is different, requires a grading expert, and is really vulnerable to sudden supply shocks, especially now that they can make diamonds and pearls.

So if money requires an expert to tell you what it's worth, it's really not money.

History had repeated itself.

Just as cultured pearls had shattered the natural pearl monopoly, lab grown diamonds had done the same to natural diamonds, and the parallels were impossible to ignore.

Pearls never disappeared, they simply fell from the throne.

Diamonds were now following the same path.

In May of twenty twenty four, a brief announcement landed with almost no fanfare.

Anglo American announced that it was exploring options to divest its stake into Beers.

This was the South African mining firm that once dictated the global price of diamonds, the company that had engineered the most successful cartel in modern history, the corporation that convinced generations of Americans that a diamond is forever, and now Anglo American viewed to Beers as a troubled asset.

By May twenty twenty five, while Anglo American was still looking for a buyer.

The Beers made their own announcement light Box, its lab grown diamond brand, was shutting down.

The official explanation it wanted to refocus on natural diamonds, but the reality was that lab grown diamond prices had collapsed so far, so fast, that the economics no longer worked.

The very strategy to Beers used to try and save there forever diamond illusion backfired.

Light Box hadn't protected the illusion.

It exposed the fiction behind the story that the Beers had been peddling, which leads us back to the question what makes something valuable.

Something is truly valuable if it helps you protect your freedom when everything is falling apart.

Across history, things with enduring value share the same core traits, things like durability, portability, fungibility, global recognizability, utility, and genuine scarcity.

For centuries, diamonds were valuable because they carried most of these traits.

But then they lost perhaps the most important trait of them all.

So diamonds had to be propped up with a good story, and for most of the twentieth century, nobody told a better story than De Beer's.

They didn't just sell a stone, they sold a promise.

De Beers wrapped diamonds in romance.

They told you they were rare, eternal, forever, and for a while the world nodded along.

But diamond rarity was manufactured before they were fabricated in a lab.

The natural pearl should have been a warning.

It once was queen of the gems.

Then technology changed the math, first for pearls, then for diamonds.

To understand what makes something valuable, Look at gold.

It can be buried for a thousand years, dug up, and turned instantly into money.

It was valuable before there were banks, ad agencies, engagement rings, and Hollywood close ups, before there were even governments.

Gold has survived empires, wars, revolutions, and technological change because its value didn't depend solely on belief.

No cartel was needed, no story required.

Something that is truly valuable works whenever breaks.

That's why central banks hold gold, why nations stockpilot, and why when paper promises fail, gold remains.

In the end.

The real precious asset wasn't the sparkling stone on her finger.

It was the ring it was mounted on.

Diamonds might be a girl's best friend, but gold is actually forever red.

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