Editor’s Commentary: Our primary allegiance in journalism is to the truth. The article below from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times does a fine job of highlighting both the positives and negatives anticipated for gold this year. That’s important to us because even though our main sponsors specialize in precious metals, we would never publish anything as news or commentary that spreads falsehoods for the sake of driving gold sales.
With that said, my personal opinion is that precious metals are the smartest money right now for protecting wealth and retirement from attacks on multiple fronts. We did not accept precious metals sponsors before mid-2021 because before then, I didn’t see a need. Even during the early stages of Pandemic Panic Theater I remained confident that Americans didn’t need to shift large portions of their portfolios to precious metals. Things have obviously changed now, which is why we vetted out 28 precious metals companies to see who was donating to Democrats, who was working with the Chinese Communist Party, and who was doing the bidding of the World Economic Forum. Out of those 28, we only found three we could consider to be true America First companies. With that said, here’s Fan Yu’s article about the future of gold…
After a tumultuous several months, gold prices have enjoyed a decent run up in Q4 2022. Recent price movement was helped by the dollar’s retreat, hopes that the Federal Reserve will slow down its aggressive monetary tightening, and renewed demand for the metal from emerging markets.
Is this the beginning of a multi-year bull market in gold? To be fair, gold investors have endured years of underperformance. Gold closed 2022 on two consecutive down years.
The World Gold Council, in its 2023 outlook report, said gold will enjoy a “stable but positive performance” in the year ahead. It’s not an outright bullish view, as central banks around the world will continue to maintain a strong bias to fight inflation—and keep interest rates high, a deterrent to gold price increasing. But recession is near inevitable in many economies. Gold typically performs very well in classical recessionary economic environment.
Another supportive fact pattern to a rebound in gold price is continued decline in the U.S. dollar. The World Gold Council’s research indicates that peaking dollar value has historically been positive for gold, with a positive spot price movement during the 12 months after the dollar has peaked.
Gold investors should pay close attention to the dollar. Gold’s approximately 10 percent price increase during the fourth quarter of 2022 very closely tracked to the dollar’s decline during the same period.
Cooling inflation—and therefore rate-hike expectations—is only one factor going against the dollar. Another factor is improving expectations for economic growth outside the United States, such as in China and Europe.
China’s reopening will put further pressure on the dollar. Beijing during the last week of December announced the rollback of inbound quarantine in January. This measure is expected to boost the local economy and stimulate foreign investment in the country.
Geopolitical risk is another major determinant of gold prices. Political uncertainty and war makes gold a valuable tail risk hedge.
Saxo Bank’s Head of Commodity Strategy Ole Hansen recently predicted that gold will top $3,000 per ounce in 2023 due to “war economy mentality of self reliance and minimizing holdings of foreign FX reserves, preferring gold.” This coincides with another prediction that countries will move to invest in locking in energy and commodity resources as well as supply chain security. In addition to gold itself, Saxo is also bullish on junior gold miners.
No doubt this view has been informed by the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, and China’s continued saber-rattling against Taiwan. Russia’s largest bank—SberBank—on Dec. 26 announced launching a gold-backed digital financial asset, claiming that it offers an “alternative” investment amidst de-dollarization.
Central banks have been some of the biggest buyers of gold this year. In Q3 2022, central banks added a record 399 tons of gold, according to World Gold Council data. Among them, China has been one of the biggest buyers. Beijing is well known in its intentions to cut U.S. dollar dependency, and it had a front-row seat to Russia being locked out of the dollar-dominated global financial system, faced with price caps and sanctions against its energy exports and its overseas foreign exchange assets frozen.
There have been rumblings of BRICS nations (Brazil, India, China, Russia, and South Africa) and their allies banding together to develop a new reserve currency backed by commodities such as gold and oil. No such plans have been officially announced, but certain BRICS nations have been preparing to diversify away from the U.S. dollar for years.
Despite the positive backdrop, there are risks that gold will continue to underperform.
The worst-case scenario would include more interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve and keeping monetary conditions tight despite an economic recession. However, this policy path would go against the Fed’s recent history and philosophy.
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.
