Newsletter · · Ashutosh Agarwal
Gold Breaks Out and the Bulls Start Arguing - Gold & the Debasement Trade - Week of August 13, 2026
Precious-metals podcasts on gold's breakout past $4,000, the miner and silver rally, and the argument among bulls over what is really driving it, for the week of August 7 to 13, 2026.
Gold & the Debasement Trade
Week of August 13, 2026: Gold Breaks Out and the Bulls Start Arguing
For nearly two months gold did nothing. It sat on the $4,000 mark like a stone, roughly a quarter below the ~$5,500 record it set back in January, while everyone argued about whether the great "debasement trade" was dead. This was the week it woke up.
Gold ripped from about $4,000 to the $4,300–$4,400 area (a 7-to-8% move in a matter of days), and by the time this issue went out it was trading north of $4,400, with silver above $65. The mining stocks went vertical: the big gold-miner funds (GDX and its junior sibling GDXJ) and the silver-miner fund (SIL) all jumped more than 20% on the week, blowing through moving averages they hadn't touched in months. Silver itself was up about 10%. Even the sleepy platinum-group metals joined in: platinum $1,753, palladium $1,389.
So what lit the fuse? The trigger everyone kept pointing to was a strange piece of financial plumbing: the U.S. government helped Japan prop up the yen, effectively creating dollars and lending them to Tokyo so Japan could buy its own currency and avoid dumping its enormous pile of U.S. Treasury bonds. That, plus 10-year Treasury yields near 4.7% and a growing suspicion that the new Federal Reserve chair, Kevin Warsh, will eventually be forced to print money to keep the bond market functioning, was read across the board as "the Fed can't really tighten, the dollar is soft, hard assets win." It's a continuation of the regime shift that started the week before.
But here's what made this week genuinely interesting: as gold broke out, some of the smartest bulls in the business started openly arguing with the popular story for why it's going up. Let's walk through it.
The breakout, by the people who trade the charts
The clearest play-by-play came from Dave Erfle, a full-time precious-metals investor who writes the Junior Miner Junkie letter. On The KE Report he explained that gold and the miners had spent "six seven weeks" building "a strong base at the psychological $4,000 level since mid June" inside what chart-watchers call a "bullish falling wedge," a coiling, narrowing pattern that often snaps hard in one direction. When it snapped, "over 20% moves in GDX and GDXJ… was a three times move from the gold price, which went up over 7%." In plain terms: the miners moved three times as much as the metal, exactly the leverage bulls have been waiting years to see on the upside instead of the downside.
Erfle isn't declaring victory yet. Gold is now bumping against resistance at its 18-week average around $4,375–$4,400, and he wants proof: weekly closes above $4,500 in gold and $70 in silver, and the miner funds holding above key levels, before he'll call this "a long term bottom firmly in place." His one worry is technical: the miners left big "gaps" on the charts during the melt-up, and gaps tend to get filled (i.e., a pullback). But his bottom line was blunt: "even a 20 percent move after a 50 percent pullback still means that there is a lot more upside to get back to those all time highs."
Other traders drew similar maps. Gary Wagner of The Gold Forecast, on The David Lin Report, called the break above $4,300 real but fragile: next resistance $4,400, and if gold slips back under $4,174 the breakout has failed and a multi-year correction is back on the table. Fellow trader Kevin Steuer on the same show called it "a textbook asymmetric setup" and noted prediction-market bettors now put 75% odds on gold hitting $4,600 by year-end. Jim Iuorio, a futures veteran, told Soar Financially the move is gold "front-running" the money-printing he thinks is coming, with $4,600 as his next target.
Not everyone's convinced it holds. On Money Tree Investing, the host "Kirk" (who prefers charts to narratives and is openly skeptical of the China-buying and dollar stories) argued gold's roughly 100% gain over the past year is "excessive energy" that may need "1–2 years" to burn off before the next sustained leg. And Vince Lanci, a trader on Kontrarian Korner, thinks $4,500 is doable but a fresh record won't come "until November at earliest," when seasonal demand returns, though he sees China buying at $4,000 as a floor and the gap between Shanghai and London prices as a structural tailwind for the next 6–12 months.
Why it broke: the "Warsh will be forced to print" thesis
The macro commentators (the pundits, to be clear, not people running money in the metal) coalesced around one idea: the new Fed can talk tough, but the math traps it.
The most rigorous version came from Darius Dale of 42 Macro. On Thoughtful Money he framed it as "a geopolitically driven supply and demand imbalance in the Treasury bond market," too many bonds to sell, not enough willing buyers. Last week's yen rescue, he said, "required the Bank of Japan or the Federal Reserve to essentially debase the dollar on behalf of the Japanese government in order to prevent the Japanese government from selling treasuries." Asked whether this eventually forces Warsh to crank up the printing press, his answer was direct: "Will this dynamic force Kevin Warsh and his colleagues at the FOMC to print? Yes is the answer, but from the perspective of managing market risks." He backs it with the fiscal arithmetic: the "politically protected" spending (Medicare, defense, Social Security, interest on the debt) is already about $4.7 trillion, two-thirds of the federal budget, growing ~9% a year, with no sign of restraint. On a second appearance, on Forward Guidance, Dale argued Warsh was chosen precisely as "a dove in hawk's clothing," someone credible enough with markets to walk this tightrope.
Others sang the same tune from different corners. Jordi Visser told The Pomp Podcast the yen intervention (the first U.S.-Japan coordination of its kind since 1998) signals the Fed has "run out of tools" and will be pushed toward reflation. On The Julia La Roche Show, Chris Martenson described a Fed that stays quietly accommodative so the Treasury can hold yields down and grind through a $40 trillion debt via "financial repression," deliberately keeping the interest you earn below inflation. And on ITM Trading, Taylor Kenney flagged reports that Warsh is weighing an emergency facility to backstop the Treasury market, comparing it to the 1940s yield-caps that eventually produced 18% inflation. The common thread: gold is rising because the market thinks the Fed's independence is quietly bending to the Treasury's needs.
The twist: the bulls are arguing about the bull story
Here's the part worth slowing down for. The single most popular explanation for gold, the "debasement trade" (shorthand for the dollar is dying, Treasuries will collapse, a gold-backed Chinese yuan and a BRICS currency are coming to replace it), took direct fire this week from three heavyweights who are, themselves, gold bulls.
Start with Jim Rickards, whose episode on The Julia La Roche Show was literally titled "The Case for $10,000 Gold." And yet he spent much of it dismantling the fashionable narrative: "the treasury market's going to collapse. Here comes the gold back Chinese yuan. Here comes the BRICS currency… That's all nonsense… none of that is true." His reasoning is worth understanding, because it's a useful bit of financial literacy. Central banks, he explained, "don't hold currencies. What they hold are securities," government bonds. So being the world's "reserve currency" really means being the world's reserve bond. "If you're China and you want to be the global reserve asset, show me your bond market. They don't have one." Rickards is still very bullish on gold, but for old-fashioned supply-and-demand reasons: central banks are steady net buyers ("a nice asymmetric trade… unlimited upside, but limited downside"), and mine supply has been "flat at about 4,000 metric tons per year… for seven years" as high-grade ore gets harder and pricier to find. He also made the counterintuitive point that gold can rise in deflation too: it jumped 75% during the worst of the Great Depression when the U.S. devalued the dollar against it.
Then there's Brent Johnson of Santiago Capital, whose whole framework is a rebuttal to the doom story. His episode on the Stansberry Investor Hour was titled "You Don't Need a Dollar Collapse for Gold to Explode," and he means it: "a strong dollar will do more to wreck the monetary system than a weak dollar." His evidence is hard to wave away: the dollar index was around 78–79 after the 2008 crisis and sits near 100 today, up 20% and "more entrenched than it ever has been," and yet gold still went from roughly $700–800 to $4,000 over that stretch. He also poured cold water on the famous chart everyone shares showing gold overtaking Treasuries as a reserve asset: "there should be an asterisk," he said, because the lines crossed largely because gold's price rose four or five-fold and bond prices fell, not because central banks dumped a huge number of bonds for a huge number of gold bars. His killer detail this week: Russia, Turkey and the Gulf states actually sold gold in 2026 to raise the dollars they needed for pricier oil and food after the Middle East war flared, the opposite of the "everyone's fleeing the dollar" story.
And Michael Howell of CrossBorder Capital, on The Julia La Roche Show, went furthest: "let me dispel the idea that gold is rising because of the so-called great debasement trade… that's not the real story. The real story is about China." His argument: China is quietly running its own money-printing (expanding the central bank's balance sheet) to fight internal debt-deflation, while keeping the yuan stable against the dollar. Because ordinary Chinese are banned from crypto, gold is the officially-blessed way to protect savings, and demand is "eye-wateringly large." He showed that swings in Chinese central-bank liquidity lead the gold price by about nine weeks, and noted the Shanghai Gold Exchange is now "the marginal pricer of gold in the world, overtaking COMEX and the London exchanges." He agrees Western debasement is real and will lift gold "over the next 20 years," but says it can't explain the last two or three.
The takeaway for a reader: gold is going up, but three of its most credible bulls are telling you the reason matters. If the driver is really China's internal easing (Howell) or plain scarce supply against steady official buying (Rickards) rather than an imminent dollar collapse, that changes what you watch, and it changes how you'd react if the popular narrative gets disproven.
Central banks: still the floor, but no longer the whole story
A quieter but important debate ran underneath all this: are central banks still driving gold, or have they handed the baton to Western investors? On The KE Report, newsletter publisher Brien Lundin and strategist Marc Chandler argued central-bank buying "was really driving the bus" for the first year and a half of this bull market, but that Western investors and computer-driven trading are now the marginal price-setters. On Excess Returns, veteran strategists David Rosenberg and Rich Bernstein laid out the long structural case: central banks have lifted gold to roughly 25–30% of their reserves and keep buying even during price dips, while official-sector demand runs about 2–3% a year against mine supply growth of just 1–1.5%. Both camps agree on the practical upshot Rickards summarized: central banks keep a floor under the price; something else has to push it higher.
The miners finally get their day
For gold-stock investors, this was the week they've been starved for. The equity strength was broad. On Mining Stock Daily, the miner and metal funds both cleared key moving averages and turned "constructive… for the first time in months." Even perennial bull Peter Schiff noted on his show the miner funds were up 22–25% on the week. On InvestTalk, a caller-driven show, the hosts liked the whole precious-metals equity setup as overbought short-term but bullish for the medium-to-long term.
The most grounded voice was Rick Rule, the veteran resource financier, on In it to Win it. Rule is the rare bull who's annoyed prices went up (he's still trying to buy), but he conceded "the odds of gold going down to the price range of $3,500 to $3,600 got significantly lower." On the yen episode he was withering: "printing more U.S. dollars with no additional backing makes the existing ones worth less… The citizens always get it." He also flagged that copper has been far stronger than he expected this year, and repeated his caution on lithium (he thinks oil majors' "direct lithium extraction" could crush hard-rock producers). Practical note for stock-pickers: he rated the small-caps he was asked about modestly (Bunker Hill a 6, Merrimacka Copper a 4), a reminder that "the sector broke out" doesn't mean "every ticker is a buy."
Royalty spotlight: how a streamer actually makes money
The one true operator interview in the royalty/streaming space came from Wheaton Precious Metals CEO Haytham Hodaly on The Northern Miner Podcast (he also hit Squawk on the Street around earnings). It's a clean look at why these businesses are so beloved.
A "streamer" pays a mining company a big lump of cash up front in exchange for the right to buy a slice of that mine's future metal at a fixed, low price for years. Hodaly's numbers: Wheaton is growing production from 800,000 to 1.2 million ounces (by 2030), threw a record $4.7 billion at new streaming deals so far this year ("an anomaly year," normally closer to $1 billion), and still generates an additional $2.5–3 billion of free cash a year (roughly $200 million a month) to keep deploying. It raised its dividend 18% this year and made it "progressive," meaning it's designed to climb every year. Nearly all its revenue is gold and silver (about a 50/50 mix today, drifting toward 60/40 gold over five years).
The clever evolution he described: Wheaton moved from paying miners a fixed price per ounce to a percentage of the spot price, so its partners still benefit when metal prices soar, and Wheaton's own cost only rises about 20% for every $100 move in gold. It deliberately buys into "the lowest half of the cost curve" (the cheapest, longest-lived mines). And he leaned into the pitch that streaming helps juniors avoid diluting shareholders and helps big miners deleverage or fund takeovers "from a position of strength," noting counterparties' stocks have jumped 25–40% within ten days of a deal. One caveat for balance: legendary miner Rob McEwen's view, which Hodaly relayed and rebutted, is that a stream is a permanent claim on a mine's best metal: great for the streamer, a drag for anyone who later wants to buy the whole company.
Worth flagging honestly: Wheaton was essentially the only large royalty name with a dedicated episode this week. Franco-Nevada and Royal Gold didn't get standalone deep dives, so treat "the royalty read" this week as a Wheaton read.
Silver and the juniors: drills, deals, and one 350% flip
Silver quietly did the heavy lifting (up ~10% on the week and above $65), and the exploration tape was busy. A few that stood out, all operator interviews with named CEOs and hard numbers:
- White Gold Corp put out a study on its Yukon project showing a C$1.9 billion after-tax value, a 38% internal rate of return and a 1.7-year payback, at a conservative $3,600 gold price, well below spot (Mining Stock Daily).
- Goliath Resources reported its first 2026 drilling from a high-grade British Columbia discovery (a headline hit of 8 grams of gold-equivalent per tonne over 16 meters), with seven rigs turning and C$53 million in the bank (The KE Report).
- Revival Gold extended an Idaho deposit with 131.7 meters of 3.43 g/t gold and says it has found 4.6 million ounces at a discovery cost under $10 an ounce (Mining Stock Daily).
- Sitka Gold (218m of 1.25 g/t including 44m of 3.8 g/t) and Dryden Gold (surface samples up to 90 g/t) rounded out an active Canadian drilling season (Sitka, Dryden).
- The neatest capital-allocation story: Ridgeline Minerals sold four early-stage exploration properties to Barrick's Nevada joint venture for US$23.2 million in cash (assets it had spent roughly $4 million on, a ~350% return), and kept its flagship (Company Interviews).
On the silver-specific side, Excellon Resources poured its first concentrate at a small Peruvian silver-lead-zinc mine (The KE Report), and explorers Kingsmen Resources, Prince Silver and BP Silver all reported high-grade results. As always with juniors: exciting drill holes are not the same as economic mines, and most of these are years and several financings away from production.
Platinum's quiet comeback
The most useful specialist voice was Edward Sterk of the World Platinum Investment Council on Money Metals' Weekly Wrap. Platinum ($1,753, +6.2%) and palladium ($1,389, +8.1%) rode gold's coattails, but Sterk drew a sharp line between the two. Platinum has been in genuine deficit for three straight years, draining above-ground stockpiles (a real supply-and-demand story), even if lately it's "trading on a precious metal theme rather than supply and demand fundamentals." Palladium is the weaker sibling: over 80% of its demand comes from catalytic converters in gasoline cars (versus ~40% for platinum), so as the world electrifies and recycled metal floods back, palladium is heading toward oversupply. His hopeful wildcards for platinum: hydrogen fuel and, oddly, AI. (No dedicated platinum-miner interviews surfaced this week: Sibanye, Impala and the like were absent.)
Bottom line: Gold finally broke out of a two-month coma, the miners delivered the long-awaited upside leverage, and the crowd is convinced the Warsh Fed is being cornered into printing. The most valuable thing this week wasn't the price move, though: it was watching three serious bulls (Rickards, Johnson, Howell) tell their own audience that the popular reason for the rally is wrong, even as they stay bullish for better ones. When the smart money agrees on the direction but not the "why," that's usually the moment to figure out which "why" you actually believe, because that's what tells you when to get worried.