Bullish Long Term, Cautious Right Now: How Two Time Horizons Shape a Precious-Metals Plan

On 3 August 2026 our Long-Term Structural Score read 66/100 and bullish, and our Tactical Score 44/100 and cautious. Those are not contradictory forecasts: they read different inputs over different horizons. Here is one illustrative way an investor with a written plan might read both, one as context for the destination and the other for the pace. Neither is an instruction.

Published August 6, 2026 · Updated November 5, 2026 · 15 min read

Key Takeaways

• Two scores, two questions. The Long-Term Structural Score reads whether the long-run inputs behind the structural case for metals are favourable. The Tactical Score reads whether conditions over the next few months are favourable for metals. They can disagree without either being wrong, and neither is an instruction to buy or sell.
• As of the 3 August 2026 update, they do disagree: Long-Term read 66/100 (Bullish, conditions favourable) while Tactical read 44/100 (Cautious, conditions less favourable). On its own, that combination is not a sign that the long-term case has broken.
• The illustration below does not say "buy nothing". For an investor whose plan already holds metals for the long term, one way of writing the rules is keeping the strategic core, splitting new capital into tranches, holding dry powder, tilting purchases toward gold and quality producers, and delaying the most speculative mining exposure until tactical conditions confirm.
• In this framework the long-term reading is context for the destination and the tactical reading context for the pace. Confusing the two invites two costly errors — abandoning a hedge during a drawdown, and going all-in at the top of a rally.
• The direction of travel matters as much as the level. Tactical rose six points week-over-week, mostly on the dollar trend. A score climbing through the Cautious band tells a different story than one falling into it.

Investors are constantly pushed toward a single verdict. Bullish or bearish. Buy or sell. Risk-on or risk-off. Precious metals rarely cooperate with that framing. Gold, silver and mining equities can face genuine pressure over the next several months while the long-run conditions the structural case rests on remain in place — and those are not competing views of the same question. Rising real interest rates, a firmer dollar, crowded positioning or improving risk appetite can weigh on metals over a quarter or two. High sovereign debt, persistent deficits, reserve diversification and geopolitical fragmentation can strengthen the case for owning them over five years or more. Both statements can be true at once, because they describe different forces operating on different clocks. All prices in this article are quoted in US dollars (USD) per troy ounce unless noted.

This is why our Macro Conditions dashboard publishes two separate readings rather than one blended verdict. The purpose is not to hedge with a forecast in each direction. It is to keep portfolio strategy and entry-point timing from contaminating each other.

Two Scores, Two Different Decisions

The two scores are not competing predictions. They read different inputs over different horizons, so they can point different ways without either being wrong. Neither is an instruction to buy or sell. The rest of this article shows, as an illustration, how an investor who already has a written plan might read each one as context for a different part of it.

In this framework the long-term reading is context for the target an investor sets, and the tactical reading is context for the pace of getting there. Consider an investor who has already decided, for reasons of their own, that precious metals warrant, say, 10% of a diversified portfolio over the long term. A weak tactical reading does not require that investor to abandon the 10% target. Such an investor might choose a slower route toward it, for example:

• Maintain the existing core position rather than trimming it into weakness
• Direct new purchases into several smaller tranches instead of a single deployment
• Hold additional cash or short-duration instruments as dry powder
• Rebalance only when the allocation drifts materially below target
• Favour higher-quality, lower-volatility precious-metals exposure
• Delay the most speculative positions — silver juniors, exploration companies, early-stage developers

In this framework the long-term reading informs the destination and the tactical reading informs the pace. The investor’s own plan decides both.

Why Metals Can Be Tactically Weak and Structurally Strong

Short-Horizon Forces Move Fast

Over three to six months, gold and silver are highly sensitive to liquidity, positioning and shifting expectations — variables that can reverse in weeks and that have nothing to say about the decade ahead. The tactical headwinds worth watching are specific:

• Rising real interest rates, which raise the opportunity cost of a non-yielding asset
• A strengthening US dollar, which tends to pressure dollar-denominated metal prices
• Tighter financial conditions and reduced expectations for rate cuts
• Profit-taking after a strong advance, and crowded speculative positioning
• Easing geopolitical tension, which drains the risk premium out of the price
• Weakness in industrial activity — a specific vulnerability for silver and platinum
• Broad market deleveraging, in which investors sell liquid winners to raise cash

These conditions can produce corrections and long stretches of consolidation; on their own, they say little about the long-term case. The World Bank’s April 2026 Commodity Markets Outlook listed similar downside risks for precious metals — tighter monetary policy in major economies, a sustained easing of geopolitical tension and a steeper slowdown in central-bank purchases — while noting that renewed trade tensions or financial-market volatility could bring safe-haven buying from the other direction; on balance it judged the risks to its forecasts tilted to the upside. A weak tactical score is a statement about timing and volatility. It is not a rejection of the long-term thesis, and treating it as one is how investors talk themselves out of positions they spent years building.

Structural Forces Move Slowly

Long-term drivers develop over years: sovereign balance sheets, reserve-management practices, monetary credibility, geopolitical relationships and the physical supply of investable metal. Our long-term signal set tracks eleven of them. On the latest data available when this article was published, most of the inputs that can be checked against published figures pointed the same way: total US federal debt of about 123% of GDP in the first quarter of 2026; a federal deficit of about 5.8% of GDP in fiscal 2025; a 75-year shortfall of about $88.4 trillion, in present-value terms, between the cost of Social Security, Medicare and other social insurance programmes and the revenue set aside for them, on the Treasury’s Financial Report for fiscal 2025; the dollar at 57.1% of allocated global reserves in the first quarter of 2026, well below its 2001 peak of about 72%, though up slightly on the quarter; and a Geopolitical Risk Index twelve-month average of about 170, against its 1985–2019 average of 100. The exception was money supply: M2 had grown by about 2.5% a year over the five years to June 2026, far more slowly than in the pandemic years.

Behind those numbers sits a broader structural case, only part of which the score measures directly:

• Persistent government deficits and a rising sovereign debt stock
• The long-run erosion of fiat purchasing power
• Fiscal dominance — monetary policy increasingly constrained by government financing needs
• Central-bank diversification away from concentrated reserve exposure
• Geopolitical fragmentation and demand for a politically neutral reserve asset
• Limited growth in mine supply, constrained by geology, permitting and capital cycles
• Gold's absence of counterparty risk
• Gold held by investors as a small share of global financial assets, so that even modest shifts in allocation can matter (the World Gold Council later put the share at about 3% at the end of 2025)

863 tonnes Central bank gold purchases in 2025, as first reported by the World Gold Council (January 2026). Below the more than 1,000 tonnes a year of 2022–2024, but well above the 2010–2021 average of 473 tonnes, with 22 institutions reporting additions of about a tonne or more through a year of record prices. Averaged over 2023–2025 on those figures (1,051, 1,092 and 863 tonnes), purchases ran at about 1,002 tonnes a year. The Council has since revised its quarterly estimates: its July 2026 report puts the fourth quarter of 2025 at about 208 tonnes rather than the 230 first reported, and its April 2026 tables summed to about 850 tonnes for the year.

None of these variables changes because gold had a bad quarter. That is precisely the point: they can remain supportive while the market is correcting. Our central bank gold buying analysis breaks down the country-level detail, and the fiscal arithmetic is covered in US debt, the dollar and gold.

The Structural Thesis: Gold as an Asset Nobody Owes You

The clearest long-term argument for gold is that it is not only a commodity. It is a monetary asset with no issuer and no corresponding liability. A bond is someone else's debt. A bank deposit is a claim on a financial institution. A currency is a liability of a central bank. Physical gold held outright depends on no borrower, bank or government honouring a promise. That characteristic is unremarkable when institutional confidence is high. It becomes the entire argument when confidence weakens.

Three of the more rigorous versions of this argument approach it from different directions, and the differences are instructive.

Rickards: Systemic Fragility

Jim Rickards' work — Currency Wars, The Death of Money, The New Case for Gold — centres on the vulnerability of the international monetary system and gold's role as wealth held outside the conventional credit structure. The most useful part of his thesis is not any specific price target, and readers are better served ignoring those entirely. It is the underlying framework:

1. The global financial system is highly interconnected and highly leveraged
2. Sovereign debt levels materially narrow policymakers' available choices
3. Confidence in reserve currencies can shift faster than conventional models assume
4. In a monetary or confidence crisis, gold may reprice sharply because the pool of neutral reserve assets is small relative to the volume of financial claims

That thesis is inherently long-horizon and nonlinear. It does not imply gold rises every quarter. Gold can decline on liquidity conditions, real yields or positioning while the systemic vulnerabilities Rickards identifies continue to accumulate underneath. This is exactly where a tactical score earns its keep: it stops a compelling narrative from becoming permission to ignore valuation, sentiment and near-term risk. His full framework and its critics are on his Top Voices profile, and we mapped the more aggressive repricing arguments in why gold could be repriced.

Alden: Fiscal Dominance as a Mechanism

Lyn Alden offers a related argument built on mechanism rather than crisis. Fiscal dominance occurs when government debt and deficits grow large enough that monetary policy becomes constrained by the government's financing requirements. Persistently high rates then raise interest expense, enlarge the deficit, and increase pressure for accommodation rather than resolving the underlying problem. Her work argues that heavily indebted systems are difficult to deleverage through default and austerity alone — historically, the real burden has more often been reduced through some combination of currency expansion, financial repression and negative real returns for savers.

For precious-metals investors the implication is deliberately measured. It is not imminent inflation or currency collapse. It is that:

• Cash and nominal bonds carry long-term purchasing-power risk that their nominal safety disguises
• Policymakers have structural incentives to keep the system liquid
• Real assets become more valuable as portfolio diversifiers
• Gold may benefit as investors seek assets that cannot be issued in response to fiscal need

This framework supports a long-term allocation while explicitly allowing for tactically difficult periods — precisely when liquidity is contracting or real yields are rising. Her detailed positions are on her Top Voices profile.

Dalio: The End of a Long-Term Debt Cycle Is a Process

Ray Dalio's debt-cycle framework supplies the clearest argument for separating the two horizons in the first place. In an ordinary business cycle, central banks can stimulate or restrain credit through interest rates. Late in a long-term debt cycle, debt burdens are high enough that conventional tools lose potency, and governments lean more heavily on fiscal spending, monetary expansion, yield suppression and transfers between creditors and debtors. Gold has historically played a role in that environment because it offers monetary diversification and some protection from adverse currency outcomes.

The critical point is that the end of a long-term debt cycle is a process, not a date. It can include deflationary scares, inflationary episodes, sharp swings in real rates, currency rallies and reversals, financial repression, sovereign financing stress and abrupt policy intervention. Gold behaves differently in each of those phases. A tactical model is what lets an investor navigate the phases without losing the plot of the larger process. We covered his position in detail in Ray Dalio on gold.

Central Banks Already Run This Playbook

A clear real-world example of the two-horizon approach is the official sector. Reserve managers plainly treat gold as a strategic asset — in the World Gold Council’s 2025 survey they cited its performance in times of crisis, its role as a store of value and its value as a diversifier. Yet their buying is not conducted at a constant monthly rate. It accelerates, pauses and adjusts in response to price, liquidity and reserve-management needs; the Council itself observed that the higher value of their gold reserves appeared to prompt a more cautious approach in 2025 and that central banks "are not insensitive to price dynamics". Central-bank demand stayed substantial through 2025 despite record prices, but the pace was visibly below the 2022–2024 peak.

A strategic commitment to an asset does not require tactical indifference to price.

That is the entire framework, expressed by institutions with considerably more resources than any individual investor. Some publish a strategic target — the National Bank of Poland raised its target for gold to 30% of reserves in October 2025 and later named a goal of 700 tonnes — and the pace of accumulation still varies with conditions. Individuals can do the same thing at a smaller scale.

A Core-and-Opportunistic Structure

One practical way to run two scores at once is to split precious-metals exposure into two sleeves that answer to different masters. The core answers to the long-term score. The opportunistic sleeve answers to the tactical score.

Strategic Core — Governed by the Long-Term Score

• Intended to persist through multiple market cycles, including bad ones
• Purpose: currency diversification, monetary-instability protection, crisis resilience
• Allocated physical gold and sovereign-mint bullion coins
• Fully backed gold funds with credible custody arrangements
• A smaller strategic allocation to physical silver
• Sized by circumstances, horizon and liquidity needs — never by a price forecast

Opportunistic Sleeve — Governed by the Tactical Score

• Adjusted actively as near-term conditions change
• Additional gold and silver beyond the core weight
• Senior producers and royalty or streaming companies
• Developers, junior miners and exploration companies at the far end
• Progressively greater operating, financing and market risk moving down that list
• Higher upside in a strong cycle; far sharper drawdowns in a correction

In this structure, when the tactical score is weak, the opportunistic sleeve is what shrinks: the rules favour balance-sheet quality, wait for better entry points and do not fund speculation out of the core. When tactical conditions strengthen, the sleeve expands again within predetermined limits. The core does not move either way. That is what makes it the core.

The Four-Quadrant Decision Framework

Combining the two scores produces four broad regimes, each of which an investor’s written rules might treat differently.

The Current Regime: Cautious Tactical, Bullish Long-Term

This is the second row. On its own it is not a sign that the long-term case has broken. An investor in this position might aim neither to maximise immediate exposure nor to step aside, and instead to stay invested in the long-term thesis while keeping options open. One detail worth noting: the tactical score rose six points week on week, mostly on the 13-week dollar trend. A score climbing through the Cautious band is a different situation from one falling into it, and the direction of travel deserves as much weight as the level.

One illustrative response, for an investor whose plan already says they hold metals for the long term:

• Retain the strategic core in full
• Avoid a single all-in purchase, however convincing the long-term case feels
• Divide planned investment into several tranches with defined triggers
• Set price-, valuation- or score-based rebalancing thresholds in advance
• Hold liquidity specifically to deploy into weakness
• Prioritise gold over the more volatile precious-metals assets
• Favour financially strong producers and royalty companies over leveraged developers
• Limit junior-mining exposure until tactical conditions confirm
• Review the thesis at fixed intervals rather than reacting to every print

This approach takes two risks seriously at the same time, which is the whole trick: the risk of buying too aggressively ahead of a further correction, and the risk of remaining underallocated while the long-term thesis continues to unfold. A single-horizon framework tends to manage one of those and neglect the other.

A Rules-Based Deployment Process

The following is illustrative, not a recommendation, and the specific percentages should be replaced with numbers appropriate to your own circumstances. Assume an investor has settled on a long-term precious-metals allocation somewhere in a 10–15% range. The value of writing rules down in advance is that they are made when you are calm and executed when you are not.

1. 1. Set the destination before looking at the price: Decide the long-term target range using horizon, income needs, existing equity and bond exposure, currency exposure, liquidity requirements and honest risk tolerance. This number comes from your own circumstances, with the long-term reading as context — not from where gold traded last week.
2. 2. Fund the strategic core first: Establish the core position that you intend to hold through a full cycle. This is the part of the allocation that does not get traded, and it should be in place before any opportunistic exposure is considered.
3. 3. Deploy a partial first tranche: With tactical conditions cautious, commit perhaps 25–50% of the remaining planned capital immediately. This secures some participation if the structural case reasserts itself faster than expected, a failure mode that is easy to overlook.
4. 4. Split the balance into scheduled tranches: Divide what remains into three to six future deployments, each tied to a predefined trigger: a calendar date, a percentage drawdown, or a tactical score crossing a band boundary. A trigger you wrote down beats a decision you make during a selloff.
5. 5. Park the dry powder somewhere boring: Hold undeployed capital in cash or short-duration instruments. Its purpose is optionality, not return. Reaching for yield with dry powder tends to make it unavailable at exactly the moment it is needed.
6. 6. Tilt the mix toward quality while tactical is weak: Direct new purchases toward gold and high-quality producers rather than silver juniors and exploration names. Higher-beta exposure can be added later, within strict position limits, once tactical conditions improve.
7. 7. Review on a schedule, not on a headline: Set a fixed review interval. Rebalance toward the target rather than chasing momentum. If the long-term score deteriorates, that is a signal to re-examine the thesis itself — a different and much larger decision than adjusting purchase timing.

Within that illustrative process, an investor’s own written rules might treat the combinations like this. They are examples of rules a person could write, not instructions, and the scores have not been shown to predict returns:

• Both scores positive: Maintain the full strategic allocation; Direct scheduled contributions toward precious metals; Permit a moderate opportunistic allocation to miners or silver; Rebalance up if exposure has drifted below the target range
• Tactical cautious or negative, long-term positive: Maintain the strategic core without trimming; Deploy only a partial share of planned new capital immediately; Hold the balance in tranches with predefined triggers; Tilt new purchases toward gold and high-quality companies; Delay or reduce the most speculative positions
• Tactical improving from a weak base: Resume regular scheduled purchases; Deploy remaining tranches according to the rules already written; Rebalance toward target rather than chasing price momentum; Increase higher-beta exposure only within strict position limits
• Long-term score deteriorating: Re-examine the underlying investment thesis, not just the entry point; Determine whether the change is cyclical or genuinely structural; Review the strategic allocation itself rather than adjusting timing; Reduce exposure if the original reasons for owning metals no longer apply

The Learning Academy’s DCA vs. Lump Sum Challenge compares staged buying with a single purchase across real historical periods, and the portfolio builder sizes a target allocation at live prices. For US investors, the tax treatment of bullion differs materially from that of equities — the IRS taxes net long-term gains on collectibles, which include bullion coins and the shares of many funds that hold physical metal, at a maximum rate of 28% — and our tax impact calculator models the difference.

Why This Beats All-In or All-Out

Single-horizon thinking produces predictable and expensive behavioural failures, and they run in opposite directions depending on which horizon you fixate on.

An investor who watches only the long-term thesis tends to buy most aggressively after a major rally, ignore valuation and positioning entirely, accumulate too much exposure to speculative miners, and badly underestimate how long and how deep a correction in this asset class can run. Even if the thesis proves right, the execution can destroy the return.

An investor who watches only tactical indicators makes the mirror-image mistakes: selling a strategic hedge because of temporary weakness, missing sudden repricing events that arrive without a tactical signal, chasing the market after conditions have already improved and the move is largely done, and remaining permanently underallocated to an asset many investors hold to diversify systemic risk. The trades are defensible and the portfolio is unprotected.

Running both scores is meant to address both failure modes. It allows strategic consistency alongside tactical adaptation. Rather than attempting to identify an exact top or bottom — which nobody does reliably — the process leans on allocation ranges, staged purchases, scheduled rebalancing and explicit risk limits. Our guide on when to adjust a gold and silver allocation covers the rebalancing mechanics in more depth.

Key Risks and Counterarguments

A credible thesis has to specify the conditions under which it would be wrong. For the long-term precious-metals case, those conditions are identifiable:

• Sustained fiscal consolidation that genuinely stabilises debt-to-GDP
• Higher productivity growth that outruns the debt burden
• Persistently positive real interest rates without accompanying financial instability
• Renewed confidence in sovereign debt and major fiat currencies
• A durable de-escalation in geopolitical tension
• A meaningful decline in central-bank gold demand
• Material increases in mine supply or recycling
• The opportunity cost of holding a non-yielding asset through a strong equity cycle
• Poor operational execution by mining companies even as metal prices rise

Gold's safe-haven behaviour is also conditional rather than automatic, which is worth stating plainly given how often it is sold as a guarantee. Academic work on the question finds that gold's response varies with the type of uncertainty and over time: a 2019 study by Beckmann, Berger and Czudaj found gold rising with economic policy uncertainty but falling with macroeconomic and inflation uncertainty, and found that its hedge and safe-haven role weakened after 2008. In the first phase of the two deepest recent crises, 2008 and 2020, it fell sharply — investors sell what they can, and gold is liquid and usually sitting on a gain. We walked through that sequencing in precious metals in a recession.

What to Monitor Next

Both scores update as their inputs change, and the inputs are deliberately different. Tactical inputs are daily and weekly market data, and the score is updated weekly; most structural inputs are published monthly, quarterly or annually. These are the actual signal sets behind the two readings on the dashboard.

Tactical Signals — Roughly 3–6 Months

• Real yields (10Y TIPS) and inflation expectations (10Y breakeven) — the heaviest weights
• US dollar trend (DXY 13-week) and the Financial Stress Index
• Fed policy direction, the 10Y–2Y yield curve, VIX and credit spreads
• COT net speculative positioning — the crowding check
• Price and ratio trends: gold 13-week, gold/silver, copper/gold, GDX, WTI
• Money market fund assets — latent reallocation demand sitting in cash

Structural Signals — 5–10 Years

• US federal debt-to-GDP, deficit as a share of GDP, and unfunded liabilities
• M2 money supply growth on a five-year CAGR basis
• Central bank gold purchases on a three-year average
• USD share of global reserves (IMF COFER) and the level of the US dollar index
• COMEX paper-to-physical ratios for gold and silver
• Gold as a share of global financial assets
• Geopolitical Risk Index on a twelve-month average

The value of the framework is not any single reading. It is the ability to watch whether the evidence is improving, deteriorating or — as now — diverging across horizons. A tactical score climbing six points inside the Cautious band while the structural score holds at Bullish is a specific, legible situation. In the framework described here, it points to patience rather than either enthusiasm or retreat.

Conclusion

A cautious tactical outlook and a bullish long-term outlook are not a contradiction. They are an accurate description of a market operating on two clocks. In the near term, precious metals may face pressure from real yields, dollar strength, positioning or tightening liquidity. Over the longer term, debt levels, fiscal constraints, reserve diversification, geopolitical fragmentation and questions about monetary credibility continue, on the long-term score’s reading, to support the structural case for gold and related assets.

The response is not to pick one horizon and discard the other. It is to read each as context for a different part of a plan: the long-term reading when reviewing whether a strategic allocation still fits, and the tactical reading when thinking about the pace at which a planned allocation is built. Neither score decides either question; an investor’s circumstances and written plan do.

This framework does not require predicting the exact bottom in gold or the timing of the next monetary disruption. It requires establishing a long-term thesis, defining an allocation range, and deciding in advance how changing conditions, the tactical reading among them, will affect the pace of buying. What that produces is a portfolio positioned for the long-term monetary case while retaining the liquidity and flexibility to survive short-term volatility — which is the version of a long-term thesis an investor is most likely to hold long enough to find out whether it was right. The current readings for both scores are on the Macro Conditions dashboard, and the full range of views informing the structural case is in our Top Voices directory.

Sources and Methodology

The Long-Term Structural Score and the Tactical Score are GoldSilverPortfolio’s own models; the readings here are the ones published on 3 August 2026, and the scores have not been shown to predict returns. The long-term figures quoted in the article are checked against the primary data as it stood on the day of publication, 6 August 2026: federal debt, the deficit and M2 from the St. Louis Fed’s FRED database, read in its archived vintage of that day; the social insurance shortfall from the Treasury’s Financial Report for fiscal 2025; the dollar’s reserve share from the IMF’s COFER data and the Federal Reserve’s 2025 note on the dollar; and the Geopolitical Risk Index from its authors’ monthly file. The M2 growth rate and the twelve-month index average are our arithmetic from those series. Central-bank purchases are the World Gold Council’s, as first reported in January 2026 and as revised in its April and July 2026 reports. The figure of about 3% for investors’ gold as a share of global financial assets is a later estimate, from the Council’s Gold Market Primer: Market size and structure (3 November 2026), added when the article was corrected; no published figure on or before 6 August 2026 was found. The accounts of Jim Rickards, Lyn Alden and Ray Dalio are our characterisations of their published work, not quotations; dated sources for each are on their Top Voices profiles. The allocations, tranches and rules in the article are illustrations, not data.

Conflicts of interest: the World Gold Council is an industry association funded by gold-mining companies. Jim Rickards sells a paid newsletter, Lyn Alden publishes paid research, and Ray Dalio founded Bridgewater Associates, an investment manager; each has a commercial interest in being read. GoldSilverPortfolio sells TaxStack, a paid record-keeping tool, and may earn a commission through two links elsewhere on the site: an affiliate link to SilverGoldBull, a bullion dealer, and a referral link to Wealthsimple, a brokerage.

Primary sources

• Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED, ALFRED archive) — Federal Debt: Total Public Debt as Percent of Gross Domestic Product (GFDEGDQ188S) (vintage of 6 August 2026): about 123% in the first quarter of 2026
• Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED, ALFRED archive) — Federal Surplus or Deficit as Percent of Gross Domestic Product (FYFSGDA188S) (vintage of 6 August 2026): deficit of 5.8% of GDP in fiscal 2025 and 6.2% in fiscal 2024
• Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED, ALFRED archive) — M2 (M2SL) (vintage of 6 August 2026): $20,472.1 billion in June 2021 and $23,155.2 billion in June 2026, about 2.5% a year
• US Department of the Treasury — Executive Summary to the FY 2025 Financial Report of the U.S. Government (March 2026): 75-year social insurance shortfall of about $88.4 trillion
• International Monetary Fund — IMF Data Brief: Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves (1 July 2026): dollar share 57.13% in the first quarter of 2026, up from 56.42%
• Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System — The International Role of the U.S. Dollar – 2025 Edition (18 July 2025): dollar share’s 2001 peak of 72% and 58% in 2024
• Dario Caldara and Matteo Iacoviello — Geopolitical Risk (GPR) Index (monthly data, read 4 November 2026), from “Measuring Geopolitical Risk”, American Economic Review (2022): twelve-month averages of 170 to 174 in the windows ending April to July 2026, against a 1985–2019 average of 100
• World Gold Council — Gold Demand Trends: Q4 and Full Year 2025, Central banks (29 January 2026): 863 tonnes in 2025, 230 tonnes in the fourth quarter, the 2010–2021 average of 473 tonnes
• World Gold Council — Gold Demand Trends: Q1 2026 (29 April 2026): revised quarterly central-bank purchases for 2025
• World Gold Council — Gold Demand Trends: Q2 2026 (30 July 2026): about 208 tonnes in the fourth quarter of 2025 on revised estimates
• World Gold Council — Central Bank Gold Reserves Survey 2025 (17 June 2025): the reasons central banks give for holding gold
• World Bank Group — Commodity Markets Outlook, April 2026 (April 2026): upside and downside risks for precious metals
• Joscha Beckmann, Theo Berger and Robert Czudaj — Gold price dynamics and the role of uncertainty, Quantitative Finance 19(4) (2019): gold, uncertainty and its safe-haven role before and after 2008
• Internal Revenue Service — Topic no. 409, Capital gains and losses: the 28% maximum rate on collectibles gains
• Lyn Alden — May 2021 Newsletter: Fiscal-Driven Inflation (16 May 2021): fiscal dominance and policymakers’ incentive to keep rates low
• Penguin Random House — The Death of Money by James Rickards (Portfolio, 8 April 2014), with Currency Wars (2011) and The New Case for Gold (2016)