Gold futures broke $4,000 per ounce for the first time this week — a historic high that, for some, signals more than market jitters. It may reflect a deeper collapse of confidence in the American-led global financial system.
The precious metal has surged more than 50 percent since January, driven by a rare convergence of forces. Central banks continue stockpiling bullion. Investors are retreating from the U.S. dollar. Commodity analysts cite a rare convergence of forces: dovish monetary policy, rising geopolitical tensions and a steady erosion of institutional trust around the world.
Giovanni Staunovo, commodity analyst at UBS, told Newsweek the rally is driven by both central banks and private investors hedging against deeper concerns. “This year’s rally has been fueled by ongoing solid central bank demand as well as a pickup lately in investment demand,” he said.
“That demand benefited from market confidence in a renewed Federal Reserve rate cut cycle, continued U.S. dollar weakness and persistent geopolitical uncertainty.”
Unlike during a previous bull run in the 1970s — when inflation was the main driver — today’s surge in gold prices appears rooted in structural dynamics. “Gold above $4,000 echoes the 1970s but today’s drivers are different,” commodity strategist Ewa Manthey told Newsweek. “It’s rising debt, fiscal strain and fading trust in policy. It’s less about prices and more about confidence in the system.”
Not everyone sees the rally as stable. Michael Bordo, professor of economics at Rutgers University and a visiting fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, told Newsweek that the surge may be overextended.
“Since President Nixon closed the gold window in August 1971 and the U.S. Treasury ceased pegging the dollar to gold at $35 per ounce, the price of gold has floated freely,” Bordo said. “Its movement reflects the fundamentals of the gold market—such as jewelry and industrial demand versus new gold production—but it has also served as both an inflation hedge and a safe haven in times of global uncertainty.”
He noted that the metal’s latest rise “reflects global uncertainty coming from two hot wars, the U.S.-China trade war, Trump tariffs and their effects on U.S. inflation and output, U.S. immigration policies reducing the supply of labor and potentially real growth, and the current administration’s attack on Fed independence—which could threaten long-run U.S. debt sustainability and the continued dominance of the dollar.”
Yet to many observers, the move in gold portends something darker.
Similar Patterns
Financial commentator Arnaud Bertrand called attention to the pattern last week in a widely shared post on X. He pointed out that gold doubling in value in the world’s reserve currency is historically rare and often precedes profound political shifts.
“The fall of Rome, Spain’s imperial decline, the French Revolution, the end of Bretton Woods [the 1944 agreement establishing today’s international monetary system]… this is effectively a transfer of real wealth from the poor to the rich elites who protect themselves with gold,” Bertrand wrote. “We’re witnessing what may be one of the great pivotal moments in financial history yet it’s being barely discussed.”
A recent Seeking Alpha analysis echoed those parallels, arguing that gold’s rise should be seen not just as a financial signal but as a sign of deep civilizational stressors. The author compared the U.S. in 2025 to past empires — Roman, Ottoman, British — where currency debasement and soaring gold prices acted as warning signs of terminal decline.
“Debt and currency debasement often go hand-in-hand in the decline of empires,” the piece argued.
Other sharp spikes in gold prices have coincided with periods of geopolitical crisis. In 1979 and 1980, gold surged amid double-digit inflation, the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan — events that helped end the Bretton Woods era and sent economic shockwaves across the globe.
In 2011, prices soared again during the Eurozone debt crisis and a post-financial crisis U.S. credit rating downgrade. The pandemic-driven economic collapse of 2020 triggered another major spike. And in 2025, the metal climbed steeply again as markets digested escalating global conflicts, interest rate cuts and renewed trade tensions under Trump’s second term.
Among historians, that pattern is familiar. Mike Duncan, host of The History of Rome and Revolutions podcasts, told Rolling Stone that the U.S. is showing the classic signs of an empire past its peak. “Everybody has a shelf life,” Duncan said. “Eventually you do get into some sort of decline phase… is this thing pushing itself toward some sort of terminal failure? Yeah, sure feels like it.”
Duncan sees strong similarities between the late Roman Republic and modern America — rising inequality, contested citizenship and elites eroding institutional norms. “We have huge disparities of wealth and income inequality,” he said, adding that even after the Roman Republic fell, it retained the outer appearance of democracy. “It’s just what’s happening underneath that facade.”
Cycles of Collapse
Peter Turchin, a historian and data theorist at UConn, came to similar conclusions through a very different lens. In a particularly prescient forecast in 2010, Turchin used structural-demographic modeling to predict the U.S. would enter a period of deep unrest beginning around 2020. He cited elite overproduction, stagnating wages and fiscal strain as triggers. “All these trends are only gaining power,” he told Newsweek.
Turchin doesn’t track gold but he does track political and societal instability. He believes America has entered what he calls a “revolutionary situation,” where long-running systemic stress can no longer be contained. “It’s not a prophecy,” he said. “It’s modeling feedback loops that repeat with alarming regularity.”
He warned that disillusionment among highly educated but institutionally excluded groups — what he calls a radicalizing “knowledge class” — is accelerating. Recent public-sector layoffs, rising political violence and cuts to higher education have only worsened that trend.
Duncan agrees with the broader diagnosis. “When systems can no longer adapt to their present circumstances,” he said, “that’s the kind of incompetence that leads to total and complete social upheaval.”
