(The Epoch Times)—Goldman Sachs raised its December 2026 gold price forecast by $600 to $4,900 per ounce, citing surging exchange-traded fund (ETF) inflows in Western markets and sustained accumulation of the yellow metal by central banks.
The investment bank’s latest gold price prediction, made in an Oct. 7 client note, marks a significant upgrade to its prior forecast, which called for a rally to $4,300 by the end of next year. What’s more, Goldman said it sees risks to this upgraded estimate as “skewed to the upside,” given the potential for “private sector diversification into the relatively small gold market,” which could push ETF holdings even higher than its model currently implies.
The upward revision comes as gold futures breached $4,000 per ounce for the first time this week, extending a historic rally that has seen prices double in less than two years amid widespread economic and geopolitical turbulence.
Gold futures on COMEX reached a record intraday high of $4,014.60 on Oct. 7, before settling just below that mark. Spot gold also briefly topped $4,000, boosted by safe-haven demand as the U.S. government shutdown entered its second week.
‘Perfect Storm’ of Macro Forces
Goldman analysts said in the note that they expect central banks to continue adding to their reserves, projecting purchases to average 80 metric tons in 2025 and 70 tons in 2026, largely from emerging market institutions diversifying away from the U.S. dollar.
The investment bank also expects Western ETF demand to strengthen as the Federal Reserve lowers rates by a full percentage point by mid-2026, a move it says could lift gold prices by about five percent.
These trends tie into what some analysts are calling a “perfect storm” of macroeconomic drivers—including inflation fears, currency weakness, and policy uncertainty—converging in gold’s favor.
“There are several macro factors driving gold’s outperformance this year,” Nic Puckrin, investment analyst and co-founder of The Coin Bureau, told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement. “Firstly, it’s an ongoing U.S. dollar debasement trade. We have massive fiscal spending in the U.S. with the Big Beautiful Bill and loosening monetary policy, which is fuelling renewed concerns over inflation.”
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Puckrin noted that similar inflationary forces are emerging outside the United States, pointing to Japan’s revival of stimulus-style policies as another driver of demand for hard assets. In such an environment, he said, investors are naturally gravitating toward gold as a time-tested hedge against inflation. Central banks are also steadily adding to their reserves to reduce reliance on the U.S. dollar—a convergence of factors Puckrin described as a “perfect storm” likely to keep supporting prices in line with Goldman’s outlook.
The latest leg of the rally has also been underpinned by rapid inflows into gold-backed ETFs. Data from ING show global ETF holdings have risen for nine straight sessions, reaching 97.4 million ounces—their highest level since September 2022.
Fiat Fears and Portfolio Rebalancing
According to Stefan Gleason, CEO of Money Metals Exchange, gold’s surge past $4,000 reinforces its role as a “hedge against accelerating fiat destruction and fiscal instability.” The metal is up more than 50 percent this year, Gleason said, driven in part by currency debasement, geopolitical tension, and central bank buying, as well as by “a rebalancing on Wall Street” where investors are increasingly holding gold in lieu of U.S. Treasuries.
“This precious metals rally has accelerated with the Federal Reserve’s renewed rate cuts, which have driven real yields lower,” he told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement. “Just as importantly, we are seeing a rebalancing on Wall Street with investment houses like Morgan Stanley recently recommending a partial swap of bonds for gold.”
Two weeks ago, Morgan Stanley’s investment manager urged investors to move from a traditional 60/40 stock-to-bond split to 60/20/20—adding gold as a core 20 percent holding. “Goldman’s $4,900 call is absolutely realistic, if not conservative,” Gleason said. “Most investors in the U.S. still have almost no allocation to gold, and that means this shift from bonds to gold may just be getting started.”
This evolving investor behavior could amplify the metal’s gains well beyond base-case forecasts, Goldman said in a previous report. In it, the bank estimated that if just 1 percent of the $24 trillion U.S. Treasury market were reallocated into gold, prices could approach $5,000 an ounce—even without broader financial upheaval. With Wall Street now openly debating portfolio shifts of that kind, Goldman’s once-theoretical scenario appears increasingly plausible.
Veteran trader Vince Stanzione, CEO of First Information, said that a growing loss of investor confidence in the U.S. dollar is a key driver of the gold surge.
“The recent rally, which really started in 2022 after the U.S. blocked Russian funds, is down to loss of faith in the dollar,” he told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement. “Gold is a tier-one asset, which means banks can hold it at full value.”
He said retail investors have yet to fully catch on to the implications of falling purchasing power of the greenback. “I have been calling for gold at $7,000 by 2028 for some years,“ he said. ”However, I think I need to increase that. Remember, we are pricing in a debasing currency.”
Reuters contributed to this report.
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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.