The Three Biggest Gold Stories of 2024

By Peter Reagan

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?

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.

Citizens are also turning to 18-karat jewelry over the investment-grade 22-karat gold due to high gold prices and general economic conditions. So when the gold jewelry does get collateralized, there will need to be more and more of it.

Between interest-payment gold staking that doesn’t always return the exact jewelry or bullion pledged, and a push for digital gold, something is clearly up.

The year has been rife with speculations of how India’s central bank obtained upwards of 80 tons of gold. If the connection between state and private banking sector is as strong as it is in other BRICS nations, it might soon come into a whole lot more.

Suddenly, mainstream analysts say Trump’s victory was good for gold

Remember some weeks ago when gold plunged on Donald Trump’s election and we called it out? Well, apparently, Trump is now good for gold. That was quick.

James Hyerczyk, analyst at FX Empire, gave a detailed overview of how and why gold holding $2,629 and turning it into support has to do with Trump:

“Investor sentiment remains anchored in expectations that Trump’s proposed tariffs and protectionist trade measures could drive inflation, reinforcing gold’s appeal as a hedge.”

Hyerczyk says that gold is enjoying support as the year starts due to political uncertainty and economic expectations over Trump’s presidency. (But aren’t those the same ones that plunged gold post-election?)

As investors and analysts now appear to be catching on to, a Trump presidency is inflationary in nature. Going back to the President-elect’s first term in 2016 and his run in 2015, he said that he wants a weaker U.S. dollar because trade partners are using their own weak currencies to gain a trade advantage.

This goes on top of the tariffs he has pledged to impose, and which, if history is any indicator, might as well already be in place. These tariffs are, and have always been, inflationary in nature.

So why were we being told that gold is plummeting due to Trump’s election? As we postulated ourselves, this sentiment appeared to lie on nothing more than Harris’ own presidency being even more inflationary in nature.

Last we checked, less inflation than a lot of inflation still means elevated inflation, but we still had to contend with the idea that Trump will somehow be bad for gold for a couple of weeks.

That’s even without going into his own comments and those by some of his appointees how a gold standard is just what this nation needs.

Sentiment has too much sway in the gold market, especially as far as headlines are concerned. During a time when gold is soaring on fundamentals, that sway goes to the downside.

The mainstream view was that Trump’s election was going to somehow be unfavorable for gold, so it had to be.

We’re only glad that logic got in the way sooner rather than later.

But this is a reminder to our new and existing readers that things in major outlets surrounding gold don’t always make sense, yet still sometimes cause gold to move lower.

One thing that does make sense are growing forecasts for $3,000 gold, the most recent one being issued by Société Générale:

It seems like every big bank and financial institution is shifting their projection either to $3,000 gold (or just short of it).

For all the talk of the importance of the $2,000 level psychologically, this importance was left behind almost immediately due to how quickly gold rose.

Instead, the $3,000 gold price is now the exciting new psychological level, which must feel like the good side of dreamland to any gold investor.

Silver Institute releases its 2024 report, and we couldn’t hope for better fundamentals

Every year, the Silver Institute rounds up silver’s annual performance and provides a forecast for the year ahead. For the past few years, we have been hit with the same theme repeatedly:

• Massive supply deficits
• Stagnation of new production
• Surging industrial demand ballooning industry that is only limited by a general lack of global economic growth

Despite this, we’ve watched year after year as silver’s prices appear disconnected from fundamentals, even as gold makes its own run for the ages. Given all the calls for $3,000 gold, is 2025 the year we see silver finally catch up and capture $40 and then $50 per ounce? I’d like to think so – especially considering the state of the silver market.

The recap for 2024 is as bullish on silver as anything, going off of nothing but hard data. The 1.2 billion ounces of projected final demand for the year mean 265.3 million ounces of deficit. And that deficit has been a reality since 2019.

How and why aren’t prices responding to this, during a time when we’re hearing speculation of the automotive industry competing with investors for silver?

The Silver Institute is rather optimistic on how silver did in 2024, despite what we consider heavily subdued prices that mostly traded below $35. They note that silver outperformed many other commodities as an inflation hedge, reminding us that our own perception might be skewed in comparison to gold’s amazing performance.

Remember that global growth is stagnating. In such an environment, any commodity doing well is worth plenty of attention. Silver is clearly that special commodity, as the Silver Institute notes that:

“Industrial demand is forecast to rise by 7% in 2024 to surpass 700 million ounces for the first time.“

This is made possible by silver’s use in a growing number of industries, starting with the green energy sector but also extending to things like anti-counterfeiting and even improving farming crop production. (Will it take potato farmers using silver spray to strengthen their crops to finally get silver’s price to where it should be? I doubt it.)

As we have stated over and over, price disconnections can only last for so long, and 2025 could easily be a breakout year for silver.

In the meantime, silver investors can pass the time by reading the report and remembering that silver American eagles are far from silver’s primary utility, however important that one is.