by Peter Reagan, Birch Gold Group:
2024 was an incredible year for gold – and 2025 may be even better. With that in mind, here are my three favorite gold stories of the year and a sneak preview of what to expect in the year ahead…
Your News to Know rounds up the most important stories about precious metals and the overall economy. This week, we’ll cover:
- My three favorite gold stories of 2024
- Why Trump’s election is “all of a sudden” good for gold
- How much longer can silver’s price stay low, considering these fundamentals?
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
My top three gold stories of 2024
Going in line with recently-established tradition, we’ve decided to start the year off by rounding up the top three picks of our own roundups throughout the year.
Which stories stood out the most in such an action-packed year? Here’s our listing.
The story of gold’s performance
Gold exploded right as 2024 started off, with a $2,000 per ounce quickly leading the way to $2,600 by the end of the year, even in the face of the cautious optimism shown by analysts like DoubleLine CEO Jeffrey Gundlach who speculated it was a covering of short positions.
Nothing was further from reality…
As a recent World Gold Council report revealed, gold closed the year with a 25.5% gain. That’s actually a bit of a downgrade, as it simmered down towards the end and was 30% up for most of it.
The report notes that this was gold’s best performance in 14 years, with an astounding 40 all time highs achieved during this past 12-month stretch.
Even better? The prevailing opinion is that these gains will likely continue for the rest of 2025, and gold’s strong holding of support in the first week seems to affirm it.
Of course, gold could have never stayed so high without having the fundamentals to support it: high inflation and high debt.
Hello 4% inflation, my old friend
In a recurring theme over the last five years, what might have seemed like a weird conspiracy theory is becoming reality. Consider the evidence, then decide for yourself what to do about it…
The normalization of a 4% inflation rate will never become official Federal Reserve or European Central Bank policy. Unofficially, the story is different – and you can’t necessarily get the unofficial story from official inflation announcements, either. Instead, simply look at your expenses and do the math yourself.
The Fed’s ever-so-tempered forecast says inflation could end the year “around 2.5%.” But a recent Bloomberg survey showed why the Fed’s gauges are, as always, detached from reality.
Economists predict sharp spikes this year, and expect inflation to officially close out the year between 3.5%- 3.75%.
Some obvious questions need to be asked, which we have been asking all along:
- How will the Fed hit its 2% target, considering we’re in the middle of a rate-cutting cycle?
- What did rate hikes really accomplish? (Remember, that 40-year surge of inflation during the pandemic panic was all Putin’s fault, and broken supply chains and greedy corporations…)
- Why did the world’s central banks set multiple, consecutive gold-buying records if inflation was really under control?
Nobody wants to admit that, just like $2,000 gold, 2% inflation might be a thing of the past.
An amusing article nearly 3 years old now speculates whether 4% inflation the new normal. I call that a shockingly accurate prediction. A growing number of economists and analysts have come out in the meantime asking the same question, or making the same claim.
It’s important to realize that a 4% destruction of purchasing power per year is very likely the new normal. Gold owners at least will be insulated from the damage.
India: The country whose citizens once held the most gold in the world
It was a toss-up between this and Texas’ sound money effort, but we really had to pick the India story due to its scale and implications.
India currently holds the most privately-owned gold in the world. The way that this was achieved, through a large population holding incremental physical gold and jewelry, makes it difficult to change. But not for a lack of plan on the government’s part…
India’s gold loans industry grew by more than 50% in the first seven months of 2024. (To put that into perspective, social media grew 74.4% on average annually over the past decade.) Indians are being urged left and right to pledge their gold as collateral for cash loans, with that same cash being the plummeting rupee.
