(The Epoch Times)—This year has started off with a golden hue. Gold and silver have been among the best-performing asset classes in 2025, up 12 percent and 14 percent, respectively, year-to-date. Over the past two months, these precious metals have outperformed bitcoin, which was the best performing asset in 2024, and equity markets around the world. Gold looks positioned to easily top $3,000 in coming weeks, with silver similarly hitting all-time highs.
There are many reasons to believe that gold prices have further to run from here. Some of the biggest factors supporting a higher gold price include the ongoing accumulation of gold by central banks, persistent inflation, and a global supply shortage of physical gold.
Central banks, which hold as much as 20 percent of total global gold reserves, are key to the long-term growth in demand for the metal. In recent years, central banks around the world have been accumulating substantial quantities of gold. Net central bank acquisitions of gold topped 1,045 metric tons in 2024, marking the third year in a row of purchases above 1,000 metric tons. These figures reflect the publicly disclosed amounts; many observers believe that China and other countries are secretly acquiring gold well in excess of reported volumes. Most of the buying has come from outside of the United States and Western Europe. The four largest sovereign holders, the United States, Germany, France, and Italy, have been the exception to the gold rush led by the BRICS and other developing nations, and have not acquired additional reserves.
The reason for the failure of the United States and “Old Europe” nations to acquire more gold is simple. Most of them do not have the money. The United States, Italy and France are each deeply indebted, with debt to gross domestic product well in excess of 100 percent. These countries are forced to use proceeds of issuance of government securities to fund ever-growing government deficits, not to acquire gold or other valuable assets.
The rise in gold prices coincides with the decline in influence of the global reserve currency. The weaponization of the U.S. financial system which began in earnest in 2022 motivated many nations to diversify their sovereign holdings away from the U.S. dollar. Gold has been the primary beneficiary. The inverse is also true. Central bank purchases of gold have come at a cost to the U.S. dollar. For several years, countries around the world have been selling U.S. Treasuries held in their foreign reserve accounts to fund their gold purchases. This has made borrowing by the U.S. Treasury more expensive. Tying alternative payment mechanisms to gold collateral has put pressure on the U.S. dollar’s role in world markets.
Inflation has proven more persistent than central bankers are willing to admit. In the United States, January’s CPI reading came in above expectations at 3 percent, and core inflation (excluding food and energy prices) was even higher at 3.3 percent. Inflation has now run hot for over three years, with the general price level up over 20 percent since 2021. Over a longer run, the U.S. money supply has trebled since the global financial crisis of 2008, while the gold supply has grown by only 1 percent to 2 percent per year. Gold prices, which are expressed in dollar terms, have thus tripled alongside the money supply, suggesting that gold has been a more honest representation of purchasing power than the depreciating dollar.
Investment markets are speculating that the U.S. government will revalue its gold holdings, still held on the books at a historical cost of just over $42 per ounce, to the current market value of nearly $3,000. This would instantly plug a portion (potentially nearly $1 trillion) of the gaping hole in the nation’s balance sheet. President Trump has committed to auditing the U.S. government’s gold stockpile, officially on the books at 8,133 metric tons, for the first time in half a century. A successful physical audit would boost confidence in the financial position of the United States, while a shortfall would shock global financial markets and further denigrate the credibility of not just the United States but governments around the world.
There is a shortage of physical gold. The London Bullion Market Association is the center of gold trading around the world. Many nations have historically held their gold reserves with the Bank of England, but in recent years have been repatriating their holdings. This has disrupted the London markets and put pressure on prices.
In recent weeks, demand for delivery of physical gold has skyrocketed. Geopolitical concerns have led to a massive movement of physical gold out of the UK and Europe into vaults in New York and elsewhere. This has led to shortages and speculation of price manipulation. European markets have been spooked by President Trump’s saber-rattling over tariffs, and price differentials have opened up between gold markets across the Atlantic, accelerating the movement of bullion into the United States.
This spike in demand for physical gold, and resulting logistical bottlenecks, are not only pressuring gold prices but potentially creating a demand spiral. Analogous to a deposit run on a bank, gold customers concerned about the security of their holdings may accelerate demands to withdraw them. This could further squeeze physical supply and quickly boost prices. Many gold derivative contracts are linked to underlying physical collateral. If this collateral can’t be secured, the contracts can fail. This is one reason why holding physical gold is vastly superior to exchange-traded funds or other investment contracts that can’t guarantee delivery of the collateral on demand.
Some gold industry observers have argued that there is evidence that the handful of large banks that issue most of the gold derivatives contracts have acted in concert to manipulate the price of gold. An illegal pricing cartel among the banks would not be unprecedented. The public discovered similar practices in the mortgage securities fraud leading up to the global financial crisis and in the manipulation of LIBOR (the interest rate at which banks lend to one another) uncovered a few years later.
The recent sharp rise in gold prices may put pressure on these banks and lead to instability in any price fixing arrangement. If the cartel unwinds, it could come quickly and violently. There would be winners and losers, and potential contagion into other markets. In other words, gold derivatives may become the epicenter of the next financial crisis. In such an event, demand for physical gold would spike further, as would prices.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
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.