Gold has delivered one of its strongest performances in decades during 2025, climbing 38% year-to-date and marking its best annual gain since 1979. With the metal recently trading around $3,682 per ounce, this rally reflects deep worries among investors about persistent inflation, questions surrounding the US economy’s resilience, and the mounting burden of national debt now exceeding $37.3 trillion. These factors have prompted several prominent Wall Street figures to advocate for gold as a protective measure in portfolios.
Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, points to broader shifts in how people view money and assets. “We are going to see non-fiat currencies become a more important store of wealth and money,” Dalio has said.
This observation stems from his long-held concerns about overreliance on government-issued currencies, which can lose value through excessive printing to cover deficits. In an era where the Federal Reserve’s policies have expanded the money supply dramatically, Dalio’s advice to allocate about 10% of assets to bullion serves as a hedge against such devaluation. His perspective resonates especially as central banks worldwide, including those in emerging markets, have ramped up gold purchases to diversify away from the dollar.
Jeffrey Gundlach, CEO of DoubleLine Capital, views gold as a reliable safeguard amid currency fluctuations. “I think that is an insurance policy. It’s in a winning mode because of the weaker dollar and I believe that’s going to continue,” Gundlach noted.
The dollar’s softening, driven in part by trade tensions and fiscal imbalances, makes gold an appealing alternative. Gundlach has gone further, predicting that “Gold could climb past $4,000 by the end of the year,” which would represent an additional 8% rise from recent levels.
He argues that devoting up to 25% of a portfolio to gold remains reasonable, not extreme, given the ongoing economic pressures. Gold IRA companies can facilitate this.
Recent market movements align with this, as gold has already surged over 40% in the past year amid heightened safe-haven demand. Reports indicate that policy uncertainties, including tariff threats, have further propelled the metal’s value, with forecasts suggesting averages could hit $3,210 per ounce in 2025.
David Einhorn, head of Greenlight Capital, ties gold’s appeal directly to doubts about government stewardship. “Gold is about the confidence in the fiscal policy and the monetary policy,” Einhorn explained.
He elaborated on his firm’s longstanding position: “Since we bought gold in 2008 or so, it’s been clear to me that the US fiscal and monetary policies are both too aggressive and create a risk.”
This risk has materialized through years of deficit spending that has ballooned the national debt, eroding trust in traditional financial systems. Einhorn described 2025 as “a fabulous year for gold, which has been a core holding for us for a long time,” and indicated satisfaction if prices reached $3,800 an ounce. His stance gains added weight against the backdrop of inflation ticking up to 2.9% annually in August 2025, with core rates at 3.1%, signaling that price pressures remain stubborn despite efforts to tame them.
These veteran investors’ endorsements come at a time when global events, from geopolitical strains to domestic policy shifts, continue to fuel volatility. For instance, tariff announcements and trade disputes have repeatedly lifted gold prices, as seen in reactions to executive actions that heightened market jitters. As the US grapples with sustaining its economic position while managing unprecedented debt levels, gold’s role as a tangible asset outside the fiat system appears more vital than ever. Investors weighing these insights might find that incorporating gold offers a practical buffer against the uncertainties ahead.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
