“Gold heads for best week since 2008” is not exactly a headline that makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but such is the present state of the American economy. Silver is running hard too, rocketing above $100 an ounce for the first time ever this week. We are in a brave new world where the rules of the old one no longer apply, and the Illuminati on Wall Street have spent the last year realizing this. Gold and silver have been on an epic bull run, all while the dollar had its worst year in half a century as Treasury yields rose (AKA interest rates). The story that trio of moves tells is one of sell America, and this past week, the hottest trade on Wall Street over the past year accelerated.
This is in part due to Japan seemingly choosing a path that will eventually end the last free lunch in finance, as the last zero interest rate policy country capitulates to this new debt-laden era of higher inflation and thus, higher interest rates. America is experiencing this too. One might think that getting paid at higher interest rates on debt that historically been defined as “risk-free” would be attractive to investors, but bond yields rising means that bond sales have fallen, as investors have balked at rates that several years ago, they would have piled all their cash into. This is where politics becomes inextricably intertwined with markets, and the primary reason why gold has risen in value as aggressively as it has over the last year is because Donald Trump is the President of the United States.
It’s quite simple, actually. Anyone without an economics degree can fundamentally grasp the nature of supply and demand, and when the president of the United States is declaring war on the people who lend him money, the demand to lend him more money in the future is going to wane. You can see this very clearly on the charts, all you have to do is draw a vertical line on election day, and then pay attention to the directions that these three lines travel in (blue is the 30-year U.S. Treasury Bond yield, gold is gold, and green is the dollar).
Chart via TradingView
That’s what the sell America trade looks like. Gold up. Interest rates up. Dollar down. So-called “risk-free” American debt is being replaced by gold in portfolios around the world. This chart is as clear a story as it gets about what investors think of Trump’s presidency. The 30-year yield was actually falling pretty hard throughout 2024, as the Fed’s wait and see approach to bringing inflation down proved to work, and mortgage rates fell along with inflation throughout 2024. But as soon as it became clear around September that Donald Trump had a serious chance to win and deliver us into a world where he ejects the global financial keystone that is the independence of the Fed, all so he can repeat all the biggest mistakes of the 1970s, smart money started front-running the election. The day after he won, interest rates exploded. Trump voters cannot say they were not warned about what they were voting for. Scroll back on the charts to 2018 during his last trade war and you’ll see the same dynamic unfold on a smaller scale.
From its peak the week before Trump was inaugurated last year, the DXY dollar index is down almost 11%. Since that September 2024 election front-running bottom, the 30-year Treasury Bond yield that determines your mortgage rate is up about 23%. From that same date, gold is up about 94%. That is an astronomical move in a very short time for one of the globe’s most important assets. To put that in perspective, Bitcoin is up about 68% over that same period in a bull market. Ethereum’s run from that point to a new all-time high was a 116% increase. Calling what gold is doing a crypto-style move is only a partially accurate description. It has indeed made a crypto-like parabolic move–but unlike crypto–it has actually acted as a store of value since Trump farted out a fake tariff threat in October that nuked a bunch of crypto bros to hell.
Gold is up about 8% this week amidst Trump’s charge to seize Greenland. To put that shocking figure in perspective, the S&P500 is up 8% since early August of 2025. These are gargantuan moves in a very short amount of time for an asset that needs a literal earth-shifting amount of volume to move it, and I have seen some sentiment in the news about how this run has to end just because it is so unprecedented in the last near-half century. That is true of crypto and stocks. Too much speculation will eventually burst their bubble because they are speculative assets and are wholly detached from their fundamental valuations. Silver is the subject of a ton of retail speculation right now, so it may be due for a pullback, but there is no reason to believe that gold, the globe’s original reserve currency, has to fall back. That’s using old world thinking and assuming that America is still seen as a trusted partner by the rest of the world when the chart above proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that we very clearly are not.
This is the new world where the largest, most liquid market in the world is losing liquidity thanks to the President of the United States alienating our allies who supply it. The idea that Europe can sell their bonds to really hurt us overnight is an outdated thought too, as the money printing bonanza during the pandemic dwarfed the number of bonds in existence before it, and thanks to regulations around banks put in place after 2008, U.S. institutions hold the bulk of Treasuries now. But bonds are just how governments finance themselves, and they are continuously offered, and this is where Europe can pack a punch. That’s how Japanese investors shocked markets this week, as a very tepid auction for Japan’s 20-year bond skyrocketed their long-term borrowing costs, and Japan is ending the week watching that reverberate into the short-end of their yield curve, as their 1-year bond yield was up over 6% in the last trading period. The U.S. market is probably too liquid for a move like that outside of a crisis, but long-term, European investors not showing up to Treasury auctions will push Treasury yields up, which will mean higher borrowing costs for all of us in Trump’s America.
The sentiment that this is a bubble in gold is a fundamental misunderstanding of what is driving this parabolic move in one of the globe’s most trusted assets. It’s not a bubble, it’s entirely rational and the math adds up. This is not remotely close to the same thing as the speculative AI bubble, because that is fueled by the risk-on portion of people’s portfolios. Gold’s rally is being fueled by the risk-off portion of people’s portfolios, and as long as long-term U.S. Treasury yields are rising, there is no reason this gold rally has to end, because that’s where much of the supply for it is coming from. The sell America trade is not a flight to cash—it’s a rotation trade. It’s reducing the number of Treasuries and other U.S. assets in your portfolio and replacing them with gold and other hard assets you can trust.
What we are witnessing with gold is unlike anything those of us born after 1980 have ever seen. The only modern move in gold larger than this was the culmination of the 1970s inflation crisis that Trump is desperate to repeat, where gold rose 133% in 1979 and as high as another 62% in 1980. The difference between then and now is that inflation was at 13.5% in 1980, while it’s currently just under 3%. There is something far more profound unfolding in gold markets right now than just a simple risk-off trade.
Namely, the end of American financial hegemony to some degree. Treasuries are not as “risk-free” as they seemed to be when the 30-year yield was falling in the summer of 2024, and good old-fashioned gold is providing cold comfort to a world being destroyed by a bunch of entitled American brats who don’t understand how good they used to have it and never will again. As much as greed has animated finance in our greed-is-good era, trust is what underpins the very concept of finance everywhere, and the gold and silver charts are what it looks like when trust is in very short supply. Goldman Sachs opened 2026 calling for $5,000 an ounce of gold by the end of the year, and just three weeks in, they have updated their projection to $5,400 an ounce, as Trump’s antics this week shot it up as high as $4,988.
It’s a whole new world, filled with new rules, one of them being that gold is probably more trustworthy than the United States of America going forward. As long as Trump is in power, sell America is clearly the dominant trade in the markets. This is good for goldbugs and other hard asset holders, and bad news for regular Americans sick of elevated inflation and high interest rates.
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