There are moments in markets when history doesn’t sit in the archives but strides back onto the stage. just had one of those moments. For the first time since the Carter-Volcker era, bullion has blasted through its inflation-adjusted ceiling, the ghost of the 1980s $850 peak now lying behind us like a cracked mirror. At $3,674 an ounce, gold is no longer the understudy — it’s taken center stage, bow in hand, conducting the orchestra of global anxiety.
This isn’t just numbers on a Bloomberg screen or nominal records stacked like poker chips. Surpassing that adjusted high is a symbolic coronation, a torch passed across four and a half decades of currency debasement, fiscal excess, and central-bank contortionism. In 1980, the U.S. was struggling with double-digit inflation and geopolitical turmoil.
Today, the world is again reaching for safe harbour — not from hostages in Tehran but from deficits without brakes, debt without ceilings, and a Federal Reserve dragged deeper into the political coliseum. The rhyme of history doesn’t need to be perfect when the chorus is unmistakable.
Unlike the parabolic mania of 1980 — when prices doubled in weeks and collapsed just as fast — today’s rally has been a slow burn turned wildfire. Gold has risen nearly 40% this year, but it has done so like the steady lift of continental drift — imperceptible day to day, monumental over time. That’s why this feels different.
Liquidity is deeper, access broader, and the buyers more diverse: central banks hedging against sanctions and dollar dominance, ETFs hoovering up retail flow, and sovereign wealth funds quietly stacking bars in London vaults now brimming with over $1 trillion in bullion. The euro may exist on paper, but in reserves, gold has overtaken it as the world’s second-most trusted asset. That isn’t a quirk of flows; it’s a tectonic shift.
At the heart of it all sits the . A selloff in Treasuries and waning appetite for U.S. paper earlier this year reminded everyone that “risk-free” only holds until politics and deficits say otherwise. President Trump’s tax cuts, tariff crusades, and direct pressure on the Fed have accelerated a sense of monetary fragility.
Investors are paying up for gold not because it’s cheap insurance but because it’s the only insurance they believe still pays out when the house is ablaze. Expensive? Absolutely. But relative to an equity market frothing at record highs, bullion still looks like the undervalued ticket if the music falters.
And falter it might— — once a gift to risk assets — are now a double-edged sword. Historically, easing has boosted gold by clipping the wings of Treasuries and undercutting the dollar. That playbook is alive again, but now with a darker hue: what if cuts are not just cyclical but coerced, a Fed bullied into submission? That scenario is rocket fuel for bullion.
It echoes Nixon’s 1970s arm-twisting, which preceded a colossal gold rally. Back then, the dollar cracked under political weight and oil shocks. Today, deficits, sanctions, and multipolar geopolitics are the accelerants.
Gold’s run is no longer a fringe trade whispered about by perma-bugs. It’s the consensus hedge in a world where consensus itself is breaking down. The safe haven once mocked through the 1990s and 2000s — dismissed as a barbarous relic in an age of globalization and dot-com euphoria — has staged the ultimate comeback. Central banks that once sneered at it are now racing to hoard it.
Retail investors who thought crypto was the new gold are drifting back to the oldest store of value on Earth. And high-net-worth capital, increasingly skittish about holding assets that can be frozen with a stroke of a Treasury pen, is finding reassurance in yellow metal that ignores borders.
This is not just price action; it’s theatre. The curtain has risen on a multipolar financial order, and gold is playing the lead with a script that stretches back millennia. Every tick higher is a reminder that confidence, once lost in currencies or bonds, rarely returns quickly. And while charts tempt traders to fade the move — recalling the crash after 1980 — the structure of this rally looks less like a bubble and more like a repricing. Insurance is costly because the risks are real.
Gold at $3,674 is not the finale. It’s the overture to a new act where bullion has vaulted from relic to reserve kingmaker. If equity markets wobble, if the dollar’s fortress shows more loose bricks, or if politics pushes the Fed from referee to pawn, the metal could easily climb further into the stratosphere. In a world of shifting ground, one truth endures: when trust frays, gold ascends.