Gold: All that glints is ablaze

Gold isn’t just glinting anymore, it’s blazing. Up more than 37% this year and already pressing through $3,500, it’s behaving less like a hedge and more like the market’s main character, carrying momentum that plausibly stretches toward $4,000 an ounce. What makes this run surreal is that it’s unfolding alongside a Nasdaq that won’t stop minting records. Typically, the two don’t share the same stage. But this cycle is different: a world caught between lingering inflation, Fed cuts, and tariff-driven nationalism has created a backdrop where both risk and refuge can rally together.

The heartbeat of this surge isn’t speculative froth; it’s the steady hand of central banks stocking vaults like sailors stowing rations before a storm. Three consecutive years of 1,000-ton purchases tells you the diversification game is real. Every ton shifted into bullion is another vote against the permanence of fiat, another crack in the illusion of the dollar’s monopoly on trust.

When hedge funds or retail punters chase bullion, it can be hot money, in one day and out the next. But when central banks buy, the metal vanishes into deep storage. Those bars get locked in a vault and forgotten, collecting dust for decades. That isn’t flow trading — that’s permanent removal from circulation. And that’s what drives the scarcity premium. The bid isn’t just supportive; it’s subtractive, pulling gold off the market in a way that amplifies every marginal ounce of demand.

Skeptics cling to gold’s dead-money rap — no yield, no dividend, no productivity. But in an era when bonds and stocks are increasingly joined at the hip, that uselessness is its greatest strength. Gold does nothing, and that’s precisely what makes it useful. It doesn’t bend to earnings seasons or fiscal policy cycles, it just sits there as the one asset that refuses to be pulled into the same vortex.

Correlations prove the point. Gold has always been fickle — sometimes it runs with TIPS, sometimes with fear, sometimes with inflation. But the broader lesson is that it dances to its own rhythm. With U.S. stock-bond correlations at their highest in nearly three decades, that independence isn’t a curiosity; it’s portfolio oxygen.

Hovering in the background is the dollar’s shadow. Reserve-currency doubts don’t need to materialize overnight to have teeth. If even one percent of privately held Treasuries found their way into bullion, the arithmetic alone points toward $5,000 an ounce. That’s not a wild pitch — it’s a thought experiment traders are already modeling, especially with Fed independence under pressure and fiscal anchors fraying.

Momentum feeds on itself, and right now gold has both narrative fuel and technical tailwind. Fed easing is sliding back into the script, inflation hasn’t been fully caged, and geopolitics keeps adding sparks. This doesn’t last forever — nothing ever does — but in the near term the stars, the tide, and the current are all aligned.

Gold has stopped being the garnish. It’s the main course, served hot, with the entire market leaning in for a bite.