2025—Silver sparkled and gold shined
Precious metal bulls will feel vindicated, but the rise in prices indicates something darker: the dollar’s decline is accelerating, barrelling towards the end of the fiat currency era.
In this our final market report for 2025, we look back on what has been driving gold and silver prices in 2025, and their outlook in 2026. Our conclusion is that the dollar is dying and the fiat currency era is drawing to a close. This is the message from gold, silver, and indeed the wider commodity and raw materials world.
It has been a rewarding year for gold and silver bulls, with gold this morning at $4390, up 65% from 1 January, and silver at $74.50 is up 148% on the same timeframe.
Trading in the final week of 2025 which includes New Year holidays was predictably light and volatile, particularly in silver. London spot silver is down $5 from last Friday’s close, and gold is down $140 on balance.
While perennial gold and silver fans are rejoicing in their good fortune, there is a darker message in their rise. Gold is not so much up as the dollar and the other fiat currencies are down. Gold is almost certainly discounting further declines in the dollar’s purchasing power in 2026, signalling an unexpected and unwelcome increase in consumer prices, probably from the second quarter onwards.
The dollar’s decline has been a death by thousand cuts, with very few of its users actually noticing, attributing rising prices to everything other than the dollar’s decline. But the next chart, which inverts the gold/dollar exchange rate illustrates the dollar’s accelerating deterioration:
Note that even with the Y-axis logarithmic, the dollar’s trend measured against real legal money is accelerating downwards, having already lost 93.6% of its value since January 2000.
Silver is telling us something else. The distortions of declining fiat dollar values have suppressed the market price of silver for decades, leading to substantial and accumulating supply deficits relative to demand. Now that China, which has been
