The Gold the Insiders Won't Talk About
There is a simple rule in markets: watch what the insiders do, not what they say. The most important insiders in the world are central banks, and right now they are quietly telling us something they would never say out loud.
They are printing money with one hand and hoarding gold with the other.
The Numbers Are Not Subtle
For three consecutive years, central banks bought more than 1,000 tonnes of gold annually. To put that in context, the average pace from 2010 to 2021 was roughly 473 tonnes. In three years, the world's monetary authorities more than doubled their appetite for the one asset none of them can create.
Late in 2025, gold quietly overtook US Treasuries to become the world's largest reserve asset by value. Read that again. The institutions that issue the world's currencies now hold more of their reserves in a metal than in the sovereign debt those currencies are built on.
The One Asset That Cannot Be Diluted
This is the heart of it. A government can print another trillion dollars by Friday. Nobody can print another ounce of gold. Global mine supply grows by only 1% to 2% a year, and that pace is set by geology, not policy.
That scarcity is the entire point. In a world where the money supply expands faster than the economy, the assets that keep their value are the ones whose supply cannot chase the printing press. Central banks understand this better than anyone. They are the printing press.
Follow the Motive
The official reasons are diversification and geopolitics, and both are real. The freezing of Russian reserves in 2022 taught every non-Western central bank that dollar assets can be switched off. BRICS nations have lifted their share of global gold reserves from around 11% in 2019 to over 17%.
De-dollarisation of this kind tends to accelerate at the late stage of a debt cycle, when a government's obligations grow faster than its credibility. That is precisely where the major economies sit today. And if history is any guide, this process is nowhere near its floor.
What the 1970s Teach Us
Gold does not travel in straight lines. In its great 1970s bull market, it climbed from around $70 in mid-1972 to above $120 by May 1973, then paused. For roughly half a year it consolidated and tested the patience of everyone holding it, before resuming its advance and powering past $170 by early 1974.
That mid-run rest is the pattern worth remembering. Even a strong bull market needs to catch its breath. If the current run delivers a blow-off top followed by a sharp pullback, history suggests a pause of perhaps a year rather than an ending. The structural drivers, deficits, debasement, and distrust, do not resolve in a single correction.
A caveat is fair here. The 1970s were not today. That decade had its own triggers: the collapse of Bretton Woods in 1971, an acute dollar crisis, and the 1973 oil embargo. The catalysts were different, and no analogy is ever exact. What rhymes is not the cause but the condition, a period of monetary stress in which confidence in paper money erodes and gold does what it has always done. The setting changes. The behaviour does not.
The Signal for Everyone Else
None of this is a recommendation to buy gold, and gold carries its own volatility and risk. The point is narrower and, I think, more useful.
When the referees start betting on the game, the spectators should pay attention. Central banks are not trading gold for a quick profit. They buy in size, hold for decades, and disclose reluctantly, with an estimated majority of 2025 purchases going unreported. That is not speculation. That is preparation.
The insiders have already voted. The only question left is whether the rest of us are reading the ballot.