Are gold and silver up more than 50% in 2025 because investors fear currency debasement, or is this rally just the latest meme trade? In this episode, we explore the supply and demand forces behind gold and silver, discuss investing strategies, and outline what to watch to see if investors truly are worried about debasement.
Show Notes
How long will gold mania last?—Financial Times
Gold Reserves by Country—World Gold Council
Gold’s rise in central bank reserves appears unstoppable by Jamie McGeever—Reuters
Above-ground stock—World Gold Council
Gold Demand Trends: Q2 2025—World Gold Council
Treasury Term Premia—Federal Reserve Bank of New York
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518: Is It Too Late to Invest in Gold? With Max Belmont – FEG Insight Bridge
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Transcript
Welcome to Money for the Rest of Us. This is a personal finance show on money, how it works, how to invest it, and how to live without worrying about it. I’m your host, David Stein.
Today is episode 541. It’s titled “Debasement Fears or Meme Fever: The Gold and Silver Rally.”
Gold at a Record High
As I record this on Tuesday, October 14th, 2025, gold just hit another record high at $4,133 per ounce. That’s up 55% year to date, the best start of the year since 1979. Silver has exceeded $50 per ounce, also a record up 65% year to date.
I saw a quote in the Financial Times this morning from Kenji Onuki. He lives in Japan. He’s a 40-year-old director of an architecture firm. He made his first purchase of gold ever, a gold bar. He said, “I thought it was important to have something that physically exists. Something you can actually hold in your hands.” That quote reminds me of an episode we did back in 2021, “Own Something Real.”
What Is Debasement?
This morning, as I ate breakfast, I was looking at Bloomberg, and there was an article titled “The Great Debasement Debate is Rippling Across Global Markets.” The idea of debasement is that the fiat currency is worth less over time compared to real things such as gold. Now, I’ve owned gold coins since early 2015, after I released episode 37 on gold. It was gold without the hype and politics.
We last took a deep dive into the long-term bullish case for gold in episode 431, which we released in May 2023. In that episode, I talked about how there was more and more debt, more financialization, and a greater risk of contagion, a greater risk of a breakdown in trust. And when bad things occur, people want to own something real, something simple, something with history, and that’s gold.
Earlier this year, we released an episode with Max Belmont. This was part of the FEG Insight Bridge series. Max said that gold is the inverse of confidence. When investors are feeling less confident about the world, they own gold. And that’s what we’ve seen. There’s a contagion right now. The gold price—what it’s worth, its exchange value relative to the dollar has gone up, because there is no use value for gold. It’s so precious that it’s used in jewelry, and it’s used to just own, to hold in your hand, own something real, or to store away in a safe. Gold is scarce, rare, and beautiful.
And so when we think about the long-term bullish case for gold, it’s that as the financial system, as the economy gets more leveraged, more unstable, that’s where gold shines. But we don’t know when that will be, or how high the gold price can get.
Now, the term debasement—this was referenced in the Bloomberg article—comes when rulers such as King Henry VIII and Nero diluted or debased the gold in coins with cheaper metals, such as copper, and so they were no longer pure gold coins. Now, if you’ve ever held a gold coin in your hand, a Canadian dollar, they’re absolutely stunning.
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