All That Glitters – OpEd |
Since the end of January and into the beginning of February this year, the prices of gold and silver have fluctuated drastically. So much so that there is a good chance the price will have changed before I finish writing this article, never mind before it is published. Even so, this has not stopped various diagnoses of gold and silver as more stable, less stable, worth investing in, avoiding at all costs—one viral tweet at the end of January showed one dip in gold equating to $2.5 trillion, “the entire market cap of crypto.”
The reason it fell so drastically (or at least, appeared to) is that a day earlier, gold had soared to a historic high of just shy of $5,500 per troy ounce (t oz), meaning any drop was going to be significant. At the time of writing, it’s sitting at about $5,000 per t oz.
Likewise, over the course of January, silver rose from roughly $85 to $115 per t oz, but has since fallen to $70 as of February 6. This has, in turn, caused some to claim that silver had “crashed” by 10%, wiping out $5 trillion.
It’s not as bad as all that. If one takes a long-term view of the price of gold and silver, over the last year the value of gold has practically doubled, rising from $2,856 per t oz on February 6, 2025, to $5,414 per t oz at the end of January 2026. Likewise, the value of silver has nearly quadrupled in the last year, from $32 per t oz to a high of $116 on January 29 of this year.
But even this is a misleading picture: the rise has not been steady, but incremental, throughout 2025, only really taking off after November 2025. This initial period of steady growth began in mid-2024, when COMEX gold futures rose to roughly $2,500 per t oz, at a time when increased geopolitical tensions, persistent inflation concerns, and falling real interest rates all factored into this initial increase. For many, gold offered a safe haven for........