If the petrodollar keeps losing its hold, the U.S. dollar will lose its reserve status. If that happens, the entire financial house of cards, built on the assumption that the world will always need dollars, will come crashing down.
The record-high level of debt across government, corporate, and consumer balance sheets is no secret. It’s been the elephant in the room for a long time, and it’s growing fatter by the decade. Its knees are beginning to buckle. We’ve reached the point where the entire global financial system looks like one giant bubble.
I’ve spent decades in the trenches of global finance. I started wiring millions of dollars around the world when a single Telex error could kill a financing deal. In my early days at Merrill Lynch and then Yorkton Securities in Vancouver, in the late 1970s and early 80s, international payments were slow, opaque, and prone to human error.
Planet Earth, we have a problem. Actually, we have many problems (the climate crisis, the nuclear threat, the impact of artificial intelligence, etc.), but the one most relevant to the price of gold—which I’m asked about every week—is global debt.
There’s a moment in John Huston’s 1948 cinematic masterpiece, “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” when the old prospector, Howard, delivers a warning to the young Fred C. Dobbs. The warning isn’t about Mexican banditos or the elements or the risk of dehydration. It’s about the prize they’re seeking in the mountains. He says: “I know what gold does to men’s souls.”
The lust for gold has been part of the human condition for thousands of years. Wars have been fought over it. Civilizations have been wiped out because of it. More recently, discoveries in California in 1848 and the Yukon in 1896 set off massive gold rushes that created chaos, new cities, and spectacular fortunes.
“To maintain global 3% GDP growth, with no electrification, we’ll have to mine the same amount of copper in the next 18 years as we’ve mined in the last 10,000 years.” - Robert Friedland
I’ve spent decades in the mining world, financing juniors, building companies, and watching cycles come and go. I’ve lived through booms that made fortunes and busts that wiped them out overnight. What we’re facing with copper right now feels different than a boom—deeper, more structural, more consequential. This is more than a commodity rally driven by speculation or short-term supply hiccups. It’s the early stages of a secular bull market that could last a decade or more, as demand grows and supply struggles to keep pace. The world is waking up to a crunch that’s been building for years.
Paper Promises Meet Physical Truth: How Shanghai Stole the Gold Crown
For decades, the world’s gold trade revolved around two cities: London and New York. They were the twin pillars of postwar finance—one steeped in Savile Row tradition and quiet deals, the other all skyscrapers, caffeine, and Wall Street adrenaline. That’s exactly why, in my twenties, I packed up and moved to London to open an office for Yorkton Securities, a small Canadian brokerage that financed junior mining deals. Back then, London and New York were where the action was.
