Gold tends to do well when other things do badly, but it does best when people lose faith in the way the world works. This year, investors have found the ground shifting beneath their feet.
Together with gold, silver has also shone as a hard money asset in 2025, just as they did during the pandemic, the Brexit shock, and the financial crisis.
That’s because Trump’s return to the White House has ripped up the underlying structures, alliances and rules which Western business and capital thought they could rely on.
The barbarous relics of pre-modern money have made a dramatic return as bedrock investments.
By redrawing the globe into US, Chinese and Russian spheres of influence, Trump accepts the way that Xi and Putin see things. Trump’s new world disorder favours military powers who have long been hoarding gold as a symbol of independence and strength. With central banks seeking an anti-Dollar and indeed anti-West asset to underpin their reserves, sovereign gold demand continues to put a solid floor beneath gold’s underlying uptrend. But 2025 shows that it takes private investment demand to really send bullion prices soaring.
While this year has seen gold and silver rise the fastest since 1979, that year was a true outlier amid double-digit inflation, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian hostage crisis. The more relevant comparison may be against the early 1970s, when gold repeatedly rose by more than 50% per year as the ‘Nixon Shock’ of abandoning the Dollar’s fixed value in gold upturned international norms and confidence. 2025 will be tough to repeat for gold and silver. But Trump has another three years in the White House, and the longer-term breakdown in Western dominance and co-operation shows no sign of backing off.
