I was staring at the gold chart the other night—something I do more often than I’d like to admit—and it hit me like a freight train.
Gold has quietly quadrupled since 2019t even ten full years. Silver has done even better. And nobody in the mainstream seems to be asking the really big question: what if this isn’t just another commodity rally? What if the world is, right now, backing into a new form of hard money whether governments like it or not?
Call me crazy, but the pieces are starting to line up in a way I’ve never seen in twenty years of watching markets.
The Dream That Never Quite Died
For as long as I’ve been interested in money, people have been talking about bringing back the gold standard. Politicians flirt with it during campaigns. Economists write white papers. Think tanks hold conferences. And then… nothing happens.
The usual objections are always the same:
- How do you price the dollar in gold without causing chaos?
- What gold price do you even pick?
- Who trusts the government to hold the gold honestly?
- And the big one: why would the people who benefit from infinite money printing ever vote to stop?
Fair points. All of them. I’ve made them myself.
But lately I’ve started wondering if we’ve been asking the wrong question all along. Maybe the right question isn’t “How do we convince Congress to pass a new gold standard?” Maybe the real question is “What if it’s already happening… just not the way any of us imagined?”
The Numbers Don’t Lie
Let’s start with the obvious. Gold has gone from roughly $1,100 per ounce in 2015 to over $4,200 today. That’s a 280% move in less than a decade. Silver went from $13 to almost $60—over 360%. Both have crushed the stock market over the same period.
People will tell you “it’s just inflation.” Sure, part of it is. But gold has dramatically outrun official CPI. This isn’t just dollar weakening; this is active demand for something real.
And it’s not just retail investors panic-buying. Central banks have been on a buying tear the likes of which we haven’t seen since the 1960s. China, India, Turkey, Poland—dozens of countries—are stacking physical gold at a record pace. They’re not doing this because they think gold is pretty.
The Rule Change Nobody Talked About
Remember Basel III? Most people glazed over when those banking rules came into full effect a few years ago. But buried in there was a bombshell: physical allocated gold was re-classified as a Tier 1 asset again—zero risk weight—the same category as cash and government bonds.
Think about what that means. For the first time since the 1970s, banks can hold gold on their balance sheet and it counts the same as holding dollars or Treasuries. That’s an open invitation.
And banks are taking it. More and more commercial banks now accept physical gold (and increasingly silver) as loan collateral. You can walk in with a kilo bar, borrow dollars against it, and the bank treats it almost like cash.
That, my friends, is monetization through the back door.
Hayek Was Right—Just 50 Years Early
If you’ve ever read F.A. Hayek’s Denationalisation of Money, you know he argued that governments would never willingly give up monetary monopoly. The only way to get sound money, he said, was for private institutions—especially banks—to issue competing currencies backed by real assets.
“I do not think it is an exaggeration to say history is largely a history of inflation, usually inflations engineered by governments for the gain of governments.”
– F.A. Hayek
Hayek thought private banks would issue notes backed by commodity baskets. He never lived to see blockchain, but what we’re watching now is arguably the 21st-century version of his vision.
Gold-backed stablecoins now have hundreds of billions in market cap. Some are fully audited, fully reserved, and redeemable 1:1 for physical metal. Others are fractional, but even those are pushing the Overton window.
Add in the explosion of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs)—where ownership of physical gold is split into millions of digital shards on a blockchain—and you have instant, borderless, 24/7 transferability of something that used to require armored trucks.
What Happens If the Dollar Actually Breaks?
This is the scenario nobody in power wants to game out seriously.
Suppose we get another 2022-style inflation spike. Or a full-blown Treasury market revolt. Or a major sovereign default cascade. At some point the dollar’s status as “just obviously the world’s money” could crack.
When that happens, pricing in dollars becomes painful. Contracts get messy. International trade stalls. People look for alternatives.
And suddenly all these parallel systems that have been quietly building—gold collateral at banks, gold-backed tokens, central bank vaults filling up—swing into action. Not because Congress passed a law. But because markets do what markets have always done: route around broken systems.
We could wake up one day and discover that major trade invoices are being settled in gold-backed stablecoins. That corporate treasuries are holding 20–30% in digital gold. That your local bank offers a “gold account” with a debit card attached.
And only then—after the fact—might politicians scramble to “recognize” the new reality,” the same way the Coinage Act of 1873 simply ratified what markets had already decided: gold is money.
This Time Really Is Different (And That’s Okay)
Every gold bug has heard “this time is different” used against them a thousand times. But in this narrow sense, it actually is.
- We have instant global settlement layers (blockchain)
- We have audited digital wrappers around physical metal
- We have banking regulations that suddenly treat gold like cash
- We have decades of fiat failure fresh in collective memory
The ingredients for a spontaneous, market-driven return to hard money are all here. They just don’t look like the 19th-century version, so most people miss it.
I’m not saying it’s guaranteed. Governments can still throw sand in the gears. But for gold can crash tomorrow. But for the first time in my life, I can actually imagine a path where sound money re-asserts itself without a single politician voting for it.
And honestly? That feels a lot more plausible—and a lot more durable—than waiting for Washington to suddenly discover fiscal religion.
The market, as it always has, might just fix this one for us.
