Ephraim Rinsky, 37, recently moved in with his girlfriend. He packed up a suitcase with paintings that his mother made, a few Hawaiian shirts, his passport, and “some gold.” Over the phone, I asked him how much.
“The first rule of gold is never to tell anyone how much gold you have,” says Rinsky. “The second rule is never tell anyone where your gold is.”
Rinsky fell down the “precious metals rabbit hole” during the pandemic—“audiobooks and cooking didn’t really catch”—but adds that the market hadn’t started “really popping” until recently. The price of an ounce of gold is at $2,408, having increased more than 22 percent since this time last year. Central banks in India, Brazil, Russia, and most notably China have been buying gold hand over fist, while selling their U.S. debt. Young Koreans are flocking to new vending machines that sell gold by the gram. Costco started selling 1-ounce, 24-karat gold bars last August and is apparently selling $200 million worth per month.
What explains the gold rush?
I spoke to a financial adviser in the L.A. area who tells his clients to carve out 3 percent of their portfolios for gold. “Gold is interesting right now,” he tells me, because there’s no sign of the two “classic” conditions that usually increase its price: a weak dollar and falling interest rates. “Gold is doing great. It’s just not the normal things that are driving it.” What is driving it seems to be a deeper sense that the world is going sideways fast. We’re fresh off a pandemic and an attempted assassination, and last week’s mini-Y2K that saw power outages at banks, airlines, and hospital systems across the world because of a glitch in security firm CrowdStrike’s software. There’s a sense that you might be wise to keep a full tank of gas and some cash on hand. Also, inflation. Rinsky, a product manager at a tech company who has also taught economics and statistics says: “People are starting to feel the bullshit of dollars.”
Carol Roth, who wrote You Will Own Nothing, says more first-time gold buyers (if you’re hardcore into gold, you’re known as a “gold bug”) have been reaching out to her for advice on where to buy it and whether to buy solid bars or coins. “The people who I know, from all ages and demographic backgrounds, who are purchasing physical gold want something they can control for a worst-case scenario,” Roth tells me. “We can see things are not trending in the right direction,” she adds, ticking off signals of economic and political instability, from America’s disturbing debt to GDP ratio and regional wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.
“Property and ownership isn’t only about wealth creation, it’s about freedom,” says Roth, who points out that “paper gold,” meaning stocks in gold mining companies, or investment funds linked to the price of gold, are other ways to invest in the commodity.
Douglass Stanley, 59, a machine operator at a Coca-Cola manufacturing plant in Covington, Kentucky, recently bought $7,000 worth of silver ahead of retirement, kicking off his “stack”—the gold bug term for a personal reserve of precious metals. Silver costs just under thirty dollars per ounce, a 17 percent increase from this time last year. “We have a 401K and a little bit in the bank, but I’m scared to death that the dollar is going to drop out,” he says. “Part of me is terrified that everything you work for can suddenly be gone.” He ordered the silver through Lear Capital after seeing their ads on TV and hopes to purchase more metal soon. This time he wants gold.
Stanley says both political parties “are spending money that we don’t have” and adds that every time he turns on the news, he feels the itch to buy more metal to protect himself from the downstream consequences of bad governance. “If I had the money I’d have a truckload of it.” He’s hoping to start growing more of his own food, too. “As prices go up, any little thing will help.”
But there are also people like Angel, a 41-year-old TikToker who lives in Palo Alto—she wouldn’t share her last name for privacy reasons—who picked up two gold bars at Costco as an “impulse buy” and a “fun way to diversify my funds.”
Angel’s bars from Costco sit in their original packaging in a safe deposit box at the bank. “I’m not a survivalist, but it’s nice to know that it’s there in case all shit hits the fan,” she says. “It’s tangible, and it’s there.”
It’s a comforting thought, in a moment when we can see our money, or most of it anyway, only as a number on a portal we access through the internet, and which can be spent or scammed out of us without any friction. Gold is heavy, shiny, and ancient.
“There’s something about gold that hacks us,” says Rinsky. “It’s been in all of our literature for millennia. There’s something fundamental about it.” Bitcoin has a reputation of being the young man’s gold: it’s scarce, there’s only so much of it, and it’s decentralized too. But no one ever fought a war over Bitcoin. And you can’t hold it.
When I asked Roth about it, she said: “I believe in the reasons behind it, but the question always becomes, what if there is a war? What if you can’t get access to the grid? What good is having this theoretical transactable currency if I can’t access it?”
But both Bitcoin and gold are assets that double as a subtle political stance, suggesting that big institutions like governments and banks can’t be totally trusted with other people’s money. It can also be a not-so-subtle stance.
Alexander Spellane, a precious metals salesman who runs Fisher Capital, has been making the rounds ahead of the election, pitching gold and silver. He has a podcast called The Right Wing Voice and recently gave a million dollars to Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA. Last month, in Detroit, at the Turning Point Action conference where Trump also spoke, Spellane took the stage. “You gotta take back ownership,” he boomed into the microphone. “If they already stole an election, what’s stopping them from stealing our money?”
(Spellane is being sued by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which said, “Fisher Capital was a boiler room–type operation orchestrated by Spellane to bilk elderly customers out of their retirement savings.”)
For now gold is a hedge, and a potentially risky one. It’s expensive to store and insure, and doesn’t perform as well as other assets like real estate or bonds. “Gold bugs are only right in the nuclear apocalypse scenario or the Russian revolution,” said the financial adviser. “The idea is that gold will normally underperform productive assets unless something goes very wrong. But sometimes things go very wrong.”
Prepper types aren’t just stockpiling metals in anticipation of catastrophe. They have also turned to foreign pharmaceutical sites or pet stores—antibiotics for fish, while not approved by the FDA for people, are the same as the human kind, and don’t require a prescription—to stock up on pills while skirting the medical establishment. Wealthy Americans are starting to build passport portfolios so they can hightail it out. Certain smaller countries offer “golden passports,” citizenship in exchange for donations or investment in that country. Peter Thiel scored citizenship in Malta this way—he also has New Zealand and American passports—while Eric Schmidt and a mess of Russian oligarchs went with Cyprus.
And for digital nomads, who don’t really count anywhere as home, getting a second passport is a no-brainer. “I’m not a disaster prepper who has a basement full of ammunition,” said Jonathan, an entrepreneur and mechanical engineer in his late thirties who expects to be approved for German citizenship in the next few months. This year, he split his time between Wisconsin and various countries in South America, with his wife and their small dog. He says he’s not a fan of either political party and is skeptical of U.S. involvement in the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. He says of the West in general, “It seems like we’re on a downward trajectory.”
As for the German passport, his grandmother grew up there before meeting a young American soldier and moving to the States, making him eligible. He’s excited to get access to any country in the European Union through his German citizenship, “presuming that the EU doesn’t collapse in the next few years.”
“I don’t have a ton of confidence in our government right now,” says Jonathan, who wouldn’t give me his last name for privacy reasons. His savings are mostly tied up in real estate but he tells me, “I’m not opposed to the idea of buying gold, but it seems like next-level preparation.”
He thinks about it some more. “If it gets bad enough that I need to trade my wedding ring, then I have bigger problems.”
Likewise, Rinsky doesn’t consider his hedge as true prepping. “That’s the flaw in this whole thing,” he says. “When shit really hits the fan, nobody’s going to care about gold and silver. Your currency is going to be Clif Bars and condoms.”
Evan Gardner contributed additional reporting.
Suzy Weiss is a reporter at The Free Press. Read her piece on Diane von Furstenberg and follow her on X @SnoozyWeiss. And subscribe to The Free Press:
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