For anyone engaged in the forecasting business, the temptation is always present to make a sensational claim about the future in order to stand out from the crowd and garner mainstream media attention. And truth be told, for those of us whose livelihoods involve predicting financial markets, that temptation must often be suppressed in the interest of professionalism.
There are times, however, when even the most brazen market prognostication can be quite relevant—and even based on sound reasoning. One such instance, I believe, is the recent spate of calls by certain market analysts (including yours truly) for gold prices to reach $10,000 an ounce at various points within the next few years.
The latest such high-profile call was made by the well-known Wall Street economist, Dr. Ed Yardeni. In late 2025, he raised a lot of eyebrows when he publicly stated the gold price could hit $10,000 within three years. His forecast was based in part on the established gold price trajectory, shown in the chart below.
Source: Yardeni Research
Elaborating on his forecast, he wrote, “We are now aiming for $5,000 in 2026. If it continues on its current path, it could reach $10,000 before the end of the decade,” adding that based on the precious metal’s rate of change since late 2023, “the price could reach the $10,000-per-ounce milestone sometime between mid-2028 and early 2029.”
Among the justifications he cited for his bold outlook were gold’s historical role as an insurance policy against currency debasement, the global trend toward so-called “de-dollarization” and the need for investors to hedge against the potentially negative impacts of the ongoing global tariff war.
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Granted, these are widely known variables that can arguably be said to have long ago been discounted by the rising gold price. And as for Yardeni’s technical projection argument for gold, as several commentators have already publicly stated, anyone can extrapolate an existing trend into the distant future using parallel channel lines (as indicated in the above chart).
That said, where I think Yardeni’s prediction is logically based isn’t just his in regard to his reference to the widely known inflation argument. Rather, it’s the established tendency for governments the world over to interfere with global supply chains through sanctions, tariffs, executive decrees and military actions. Indeed, this trend has taken on a life of its own in recent years, diminishing the ready availability of a wide range of critical goods and upsetting major industries due to the uncertainty those actions engender.
One recent example of this can be found in President Trump’s proclamation on December 31, “to delay increases in U.S. tariffs for imported upholstered furniture, kitchen cabinets and vanities for one year,” in the words of an article in The Hill.
The federal government placed a 25% tariff on those items and was expected to increase that rate starting on New Year’s Day 2026, with various furnishings and vanities expected to see tariff rates between 30% and 50% starting in 2026. However, those anticipated rate hikes were delayed for another year after the White House’s latest move.
Commenting on this development, one analyst observed, “Tariffs, per se, are not the problem—it’s their unpredictability. If you have a container of furniture on the water, and the tariff pops by 25% before it lands in California, there goes your gross margin. Likewise, if you just invested in a new furniture production line in North Carolina to take advantage of 50% protectionist tariffs—well, there goes your gross margin, too.”
Tariffs aside, the classic layman’s definition of inflation as “too much money chasing too few goods” offers additional insights into the seemingly unstoppable strength of gold’s bull market—particularly the “too few goods” part of that equation. Given the steady nature of supply chain disruptions related to war and tariffs since at least 2022, inflation’s sting isn’t likely to abate anytime in the foreseeable future.
What’s more, because global supply chains are now in a near-constant state of flux, the relentless tendency for currency over-printing and deficit spending is making itself felt in a way that it seldom did in the relatively stable years between the 1980s and the years immediately prior to 2020, when the private sector was able to consistently produce enough goods to match, or exceed, the pace of dollar printing.
By contrast, the current paradigm of secular inflation is a recipe for the continued strength of the gold price as investors worldwide desperately search for ways to protect the purchasing power of their money. Gold and its “sister” metal silver are the most obvious choices based on the historical reliability of the precious metals to retain their value in the face of persistent currency weakness.
For these reasons, I believe the $10,000 per ounce gold argument will eventually be proven correct. To that end, our gold mining stock and related positions in the Cabot Turnaround Letter should continue to benefit from the ongoing precious metals bull market.
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