- Goldman Sachs predicts China’s massive gold purchases could push the price of an ounce of gold up to $3,000 by the end of 2025.
- Central banks around the world purchased 64 tons of gold in October, with China officially purchasing the most at around 55 tons – a number believed to be 10 times less than the actual amount.
- The vast majority of the world’s central banks – 81 percent – are expected to increase their gold holdings in the next year, and no banks anticipate selling their gold reserves.
- Officially reported Chinese gold reserve holdings increased to 72.96 million troy ounces by the end of November.
- Gold demand around the world is fueled by a need to diversify assets amid geopolitical tensions and concerns over foreign currency reserves that could be frozen by adversarial nations.
(Natural News)—The price of an ounce of gold could reach $3,000 by the end of 2025, driven by the People’s Bank of China’s massive gold purchases and global monetary easing.
This is according to a prediction made by Goldman Sachs precious metals analyst Lina Thomas, who supported her prediction with recent data showing a surge in gold buying not just by the PBOC but by other central banks. (Related: Gold and silver hit record highs amid geopolitical tensions and Fed rate cuts.)
Central banks purchased 64 tons of gold in October, significantly higher than the average of 17 tons before 2022. China emerged as the largest buyer, purchasing 55 tons, despite reporting only five tons to the public. This suggests that China’s actual gold purchases are ten times higher than officially acknowledged.
Goldman Sachs notes that 81 percent of central banks surveyed by the World Gold Council expect global central bank gold holdings to rise in the next 12 months, with none expecting a decline.
China resumes gold purchases after short pause
The PBOC resumed its massive streak of gold purchases in November following a short hiatus. Official data from the PBOC showed that gold holdings increased to 72.96 million fine troy ounces at the end of November, up from 72.80 million troy ounces a month earlier.
The PBOC is the world’s largest official sector buyer of gold – a title the communist bank has held since 2023. The gold purchases are expected to support demand for precious metals by Chinese investors.
However, the value of China’s gold reserves fell to $193.43 billion at the end of November from $199.06 billion at the end of October, reflecting a decline in gold prices during the month.
Gold prices dropped in November for the first time since June, driven by a short wave of sell-offs following President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in the November election.
Spot prices for gold are down five percent since hitting a record high of $2,790.15 an ounce on Oct. 31 but remain up 28 percent for the year.
Gold purchases driven by demand for asset diversification amid growing geopolitical tensions
The surge in central bank gold purchases, particularly by China, is driven by a combination of financial and geopolitical factors. Goldman Sachs highlights that since the global financial crisis, many emerging market central banks have sought to diversify their reserves, viewing gold as a financial hedge. Geopolitical sanctions, particularly the freezing of central bank assets, have also played a crucial role.
The freezing of Russian central bank assets in 2022 marked a turning point, prompting many emerging market central banks to rethink what is considered risk-free. Following the freeze, purchases by central banks and other institutions in the London over-the-counter market surged fivefold. In China, prominent economists have emphasized the necessity of diversifying foreign exchange reserves to mitigate potential U.S. sanctions.
More related stories:
- China resumes gold purchases, sparking market rally and shaping global gold dynamics.
- Michael Yon and Mike Adams discuss the INFORMATION WAR against GOLD.
- Mike Adams Sermon 65 from the Church of Natural Abundance: GOLD is God’s money, while fiat currencies are SHADOW MONEY.
- Gold is getting close to becoming world’s reserve currency, says precious metals expert Andrew Sorchini.
- DOLLAR DEMISE: China selling U.S. Treasury bonds in record numbers in favor of gold, other commodities.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
