A Most Profitable Panic

Gold just had a couple of rough days. Sentiment is on the floor. The miners have never been more profitable. So ignore the noise — and zoom out.

You don’t climb Everest in one push. You drag yourself to base camp, sit there feeling wretched while your blood thickens for the thin air, climb a little higher, sleep a little lower — and only then go on. Rush it, and the mountain kills you. Here is the detail keeping me up at night in the best possible way: Everest stands at 8,849 metres — almost exactly our 2030 inflationary target for gold of ~$8,900. The metres and the dollars line up like a cosmic in-joke.

So when gold briefly dipped below 4,100 this week, I didn’t reach for the antacids — I reached for the altimeter. We are not falling off the mountain. We are acclimatising. That is the whole argument of our 20th-anniversary In Gold We Trust report — “Back to the Monetary Future”: what the press files as a correction is, in the longer arc, a rest stop.

Chart 1: The Everest Ascent — gold’s cycle, mapped onto the mountain

Source: In Gold We Trust report 2026

Let me make the case the way I would if you cornered me in the lift on the way down from base camp.

01 — The Altimeter: A correction, not a top

Ted Butler dissected the sell-off itself beautifully in his last dispatch, “Buy the Dip and Let her Rip?” The trigger was mundane — a hot May jobs report (172k added, unemployment 4.3%) sent ten-year yields to 4.55%, firmed the dollar, and scattered the rate-cut crowd. Silver fell more than twice as hard as gold, because when liquidity tightens our “devil’s metal” is sold first as an industrial plaything and only later remembered as money.