Newsletter · · Ashutosh Agarwal

The Fed Hiked and Gold Barely Blinked - Gold & the Debasement Trade - Week of September 17, 2026

Gold and the Debasement Trade for the week of September 10 to 17, 2026. Podcast synthesis on why the Fed's first rate hike since 2023 barely moved gold, the debasement-trade thesis from Gromen, Dale, Merk and others, the bond-market revolt and Treasury's toolkit under Bessent, de-dollarization and central-bank gold buying, the Barrick-Newmont Nevada deal, and where the miners and silver go from here.

Gold & the Debasement Trade

Week of September 17, 2026: The Fed Hiked and Gold Barely Blinked

For three years, the rule on trading desks was simple: if interest rates go up, sell gold. This week the Federal Reserve raised interest rates for the first time since 2023, and gold did almost nothing. It drifted, silver actually rose, and the people who own gold as a bet against government money-printing spent the week arguing that the rate hike proves them right rather than proving them wrong.

That inversion, a rate hike that gold shrugged off, was the single most-discussed idea across this week's podcasts. Below is what the operators who run mining companies and funds, and the pundits who forecast the big picture, actually said. As always, every claim links to the specific episode, and we keep the people with money in the ground separate from the people with opinions on the screen.

First, the scoreboard

It was a quiet week for prices and a loud one for policy.

  • Gold barely moved: the big gold ETF, GLD, rose about 0.5% on the week, hovering around $4,200–$4,300 an ounce in the podcast commentary, still roughly a fifth below the ~$5,500–$5,600 record set back in January.
  • Silver quietly outperformed, with the silver ETF SLV up about 2.6%, trading in the $63–65 range.
  • The miners went sideways: gold-miner ETF GDX was flat (-0.1%), junior miners GDXJ -0.4%, silver miners SIL -1.2%.
  • Platinum and palladium were flat (PPLT -0.4%, PALL +0.04%).
  • The real action was in bonds: the 10-year Treasury yield poked above 5% intraday, the first time since July 2007, before settling near 4.95%, while long-dated Treasuries (TLT) rose about 1.2%.

(Weekly price moves are from market data for September 10–17; the per-ounce levels are the ones speakers quoted on the podcasts, attributed as such.)

The event: On Wednesday, September 16, Chair Kevin Warsh's Fed raised rates by a quarter point, its first hike in about three years. Markets had priced this at better than 90% odds, so it was no shock. But Warsh framed it carefully, saying the Fed had merely "removed some accommodation" and declining to call policy "restrictive." Europe's central bank had hiked the week before. The question everyone wrestled with: if higher rates are supposed to hurt gold, why didn't they?

A quick plain-English glossary, because these terms come up constantly:

  • The debasement trade: buying hard assets (gold, silver, sometimes Bitcoin) because you expect governments to keep creating new money faster than the economy grows, which eats away the value of each dollar.
  • Real interest rates: the interest you earn minus inflation. If a bond pays 5% but prices rise 8%, your "real" return is negative 3%, you're losing purchasing power. Gold, which pays no interest, tends to do well when real rates are negative.
  • Yield curve control (YCC): when a government/central bank actively caps long-term interest rates by buying bonds. It's a polite way to describe money-printing aimed at the bond market.
  • Fiscal dominance: when a government's debt load gets so big that the central bank ends up serving the budget (keeping borrowing costs down) rather than fighting inflation.

Why a rate hike didn't sink gold

The clearest explanation came from Craig Hemke of TF Metals, talking with Andrew Maguire on Kinesis Money: "Gold's Biggest Shift in Decades?" (Sept 14). His point: gold's old relationship with interest rates broke in 2022. It used to be that every 1% rise in real yields knocked gold down about 14%. The most recent move? A 4% rise in yields produced a $110 rise in gold. As he put it, it's now a "win-win, it's the debasement trade. Everyone is into the debasement trade." If yields fall, gold rises; if yields go up, gold rises anyway, because investors would rather hold something that isn't losing value than a bond paying less than inflation. He also noted that Morgan Stanley's suggested portfolio shifted from the classic 60% stocks / 40% bonds to 60/20/20, splitting the bond half into Treasuries and gold.

The gold dealers made the same argument more bluntly. On the Money Metals Weekly Market Wrap: "To Hike or Not to Hike?" (Sept 16), host Mike Maharrey (relaying Andy Schectman and economist Daniel Lacalle) argued that selling metal on a rate hike misreads what a hike even means: "If you sell silver and gold because there is a rate hike, then it's because you don't understand money." Lacalle's fuller version, from his own Money Metals interview (Sept 11): "A rate hike is the evidence that the solvency of government is being less and less credible… it's also the evidence of persistent inflation." His view is that raising rates does nothing about an oil-price shock or government spending, it only squeezes small businesses and families, so "all roads lead to more inflation."

Even the measured voices agreed gold's resilience was notable. Axel Merk, who runs about $2.8 billion in precious-metals strategies, appeared twice. On his same-day reaction, Thoughtful Money: "SPECIAL REPORT: Fed Hikes Rates!" (Sept 17), he flagged that the real 10-year yield is now 2.69%, "that's huge," and yet "the price of gold has been holding up around $4,200, $4,300. I think that's very impressive in that environment." His read on Warsh: this is a credible, hawkish chair trying to stay in his lane, not a puppet, and Merk himself is still holding "quite a substantial amount in both gold and gold mining. If I believed that everything would be perfect, I'd be selling my gold."

The big picture: how close to the end are we?

The most substantive macro discussion of the week was a rare joint sit-down between Luke Gromen and Darius Dale on Thoughtful Money: "How Close To The End Are We?" (Sept 13). It's worth unpacking because it lays out the whole debasement thesis in one place.

Dale frames the U.S. debt problem as a progression through "paradigms": from too many bonds and not enough buyers (where we are now), to a "grow-your-way-out" boom phase, and eventually to "default via debasement", printing money to absorb the bonds nobody wants. Using a baseball analogy, he puts us "somewhere between the top of the third and the bottom of the fourth" of the whole story, but agrees a genuine bond-market crisis could arrive "by the end of next year at the earliest," and likely by the end of 2028.

Gromen thinks we're further along, "sixth, seventh, or even eighth inning" of the bond-market crisis specifically. His headline number, and the one worth remembering: what he calls "true interest expense" (the government's interest payments plus Social Security, Medicare and veterans' benefits) has already hit 105% of all federal receipts through the first three fiscal quarters. In plain terms, those obligations alone now cost more than the government takes in. And crucially, he argues, about 60% of federal spending is owed in things the government can't print (hips, knees, doctors' time, inflation-adjusted Social Security checks), so "the more they print, the faster the stuff they can't print runs away from them." His evidence that the regime has flipped: the day Treasury Secretary Bessent announced a $6 billion bond buyback and the 10-year yield still rose 5 basis points, gold went up 1.5% anyway. His allocation answer is a striking 40% in gold, and he expects the "ninth inning" to feature gold rising $100, $200, even $300 in a single day when the Fed drops all pretense.

Dale added the number that explains why bond investors are nervous: his firm runs five different models for what the 10-year Treasury yield "should" be, and they average 5.87% (ranging from 5.2% to 6.27%). If that's fair value, then "Bessent's panicking at 4.7-something percent," and the natural drift is higher, not lower.

The bond market is in revolt, and the Treasury's toolkit

A recurring theme: the U.S. Treasury, under Bessent, is throwing everything it has at long-term interest rates, and the market keeps pushing back.

A precious-metals fund manager on Wealthion: "The Bond Market Is in Revolt" (Sept 14) counted "seven things in three weeks" from Bessent: a roughly $95 billion intervention to support the Japanese yen ("the biggest ever"), talk of expanding currency swap lines, upsizing Treasury buybacks (he'd said $2→$4 billion but "did six"), funding it from the Treasury's ~$950 billion account at the Fed, and even declaring on live TV that he was "the house." His verdict: "all of these things are moving us down the pathway of yield curve control… money-printing light," and that's "quite frankly what's holding gold where it is." He also pushed back on the idea that rising fuel costs are crushing miners, doing the math on Agnico Eagle: every 10% rise in diesel adds only about $6 to cash costs against roughly $1,116 in total cash costs, so a 30% diesel jump is under 2% of costs. "Miners have been triply unduly punished."

The more apocalyptic version came from Alasdair Macleod on WTFinance (Sept 11), who thinks the entire paper-money system could be finished "in 18 months, two years." His view of the buybacks: "sheer desperation… every time it ratchets up, the bond yield goes up because he's just advertising that he's got a problem."

There was also a genuinely useful skeptical/nuanced counter from Dan Tapiero on Milk Road (Sept 14), a macro investor who used to work alongside Bessent under Stan Druckenmiller. His point: the yen intervention "pretty much put the bottom in for gold," because the dollar and gold move in opposite directions, and by capping the dollar-yen exchange rate Bessent effectively capped the dollar. "I think we're probably near the peak in interest rates as well."

And a sharp warning from Danny Moses (of "The Big Short" fame) on RiskReversal (Sept 14): "Bessent says he's the house. Great, guess what? All the cards are turned over," pointing to $40 trillion in debt, a $2 trillion deficit, and ~$10 trillion of bonds maturing in the next 12 months. His stance on gold is simple: "every drawdown to me is a buying opportunity."

The skeptics, and why they still like gold anyway

Not everyone buys the "the dollar is dying" story, and this week produced two of the most intellectually honest pushbacks of the run.

Jim Rickards, on Commodity Culture: "Gold's War Time Premium Finally Here" (Sept 16), spent much of the interview debunking the loudest gold-bug talking points even while staying bullish. His key correction: "reserves are not currencies, they're securities." When countries like Japan or China sell Treasuries, he argues, it's not because they're fleeing the dollar, it's because they're short of dollars and need them to prop up their own currencies. "That's not a flight from the dollar. If anything, you're trying to prevent a flight from your own currency." He's also dismissive of the idea that China's payment system (CIPS) threatens the dollar: countries pile up rupees and rubles, then "call your foreign exchange broker and sell it and get dollars." Yet he's still bullish, mostly on geopolitics: with the Strait of Hormuz and Red Sea disrupted, he estimates the real spot price of oil is around $150 a barrel, not the ~$105 shown in futures, and that coming inflation is "extremely bullish for gold." He walked through the mechanics of the U.S. potentially revaluing its gold (the Fed carries it at $42.22 an ounce; marking it to market would be worth over $1.3 trillion), noting it was actually done under Eisenhower in the 1950s.

That same revaluation idea got a lively airing from Danny Moses and Guy Adami, who are convinced those conversations are happening "in back rooms," while stressing the real question isn't whether the U.S. gold exists in Fort Knox, but "how many times it's been levered."

And for a full-throated debasement skeptic, note that not every episode we screened made the cut: on one widely-followed show, the host dismissed the whole narrative, arguing that with inflation around 3.4% "there is no debasement issue," and criticized "gold bugs for promoting fear narratives without timelines." Worth knowing the other side of the trade exists.

De-dollarization and the great gold "coming home"

Underneath the quiet price week, the durable story remained countries pulling their gold home and diversifying away from U.S. Treasuries.

  • Chris Whalen (of the Institutional Risk Analyst) on The Julia La Roche Show #407 (Sept 12) said he's been "accumulating more gold and silver during the weakness," but that it takes a fresh catalyst ("a bad Treasury auction, that sort of thing") to push gold to $6,000–$7,000. He noted Russia sold 100 tons of gold to China to help finance its war, and that the physical metal is going East and staying there, while insisting the dollar is not going away as a trade currency ("still around 90% of all transactions"). His real worry: that policymakers have "lost the ability to control long-term interest rates."
  • Josh Phair of Scottsdale Mint, on Sprott Money News: "Global Gold Rush" (Sept 11), cited Société Générale confirming China is buying again (20 tons in August, 80 tons year-to-date) and flagged that the U.S. designated silver a "critical mineral" last year and set up something called "Project Vault" with price floors, which he suspects means quiet government silver buying. He also pointed to Morgan Stanley recommending a 20% precious-metals allocation, "when a bank is getting that high, it's a signal."
  • On the repatriation front, Francis Hunt on Palisades Gold Radio (Sept 10) tied it together: "South Korea, for the first time in 13 years, buying gold, dumping treasuries. Same for Norway, the largest wealth fund… They're taking it home." Macleod added the more conspiratorial edge, that European central banks (the Netherlands most recently, France and Germany earlier) have concluded gold "earmarked" at the New York Fed has effectively "gone missing."

The operators: what the people who actually run the mines and funds are saying

This section is the insiders, mining analysts and portfolio managers with capital committed, kept deliberately apart from the forecasters above.

The one big-cap deal of the week. Mining analyst Joe Mazumdar of Exploration Insights broke down the new Barrick–Newmont Nevada arrangement on Mining Stock Education (Sept 15). Barrick wants to spin off its North American assets from its "rest of the world" portfolio to escape the discount investors apply to mines in places like Pakistan, Mali and the DRC. The prize is Four Mile, a "transformational" deposit of roughly 15–16 million ounces at a remarkable 15–17 grams per ton that analysts value at $6.6–10 billion. Newmont (which owns 38.5% of the Nevada joint venture) is contributing about $1.95 billion, which implies a valuation of ~$5 billion for Four Mile, a 25–50% discount to analyst estimates. The market read it exactly that way: "Newmont stock went up, Barrick stock went down." Mazumdar's take is that the deal still makes sense for both because Four Mile could share Nevada's existing permitted processing plants rather than building new ones, so if you owned both stocks, "you'd vote yes on both ends."

How much cash the sector is throwing off. Mazumdar also shared his half-yearly tally: roughly 20–30 precious-metals companies generated about $70 billion of revenue in the first half of 2026 and returned about 30% of it to shareholders (~$20–21 billion, roughly $7–8 billion in dividends and $13–14 billion in buybacks), but 70–80% of all that came from just the top five companies. His refrain: for the majors, "cash flow is more important than production," because their new shareholders are generalists who want stable dividends and see the ETF, not another miner, as the competition.

"These things are cheap." Financier Rick Rule, on Commodity Culture: "Silver May No Longer Be Contrarian, But the Miners Are" (Sept 17), noted that Wheaton Precious Metals and Agnico Eagle, the two he'd earlier called "a gift from God," are both up around 30% since, and he still thinks they're cheap "because they're indestructible." His framework for ordinary investors: if the dollar loses 75% of its purchasing power over a decade (his base case, "a $1,000 basket of goods will cost $4,000 ten years from now"), you don't need to gamble on tiny explorers; owning the highest-quality names captures most of the upside. For context, he noted that in the 1970s gold rose 25–26-fold while the gold-miner index rose 49-fold. On silver, he's honest that there are "precious few" quality names, which is why silver ETFs are forced to hold Wheaton and Pan American (55% of whose revenue is actually gold), and he thinks SILJ better represents true silver miners than SIL. His verdict on long bonds: "certificates of guaranteed confiscation."

The missing retail money. Fund manager Greg Orrell of OCM Gold Fund, on Mining Stock Education (Sept 11), made the bull case that gold producers are still undervalued precisely because retail investors haven't shown up this cycle, there's been no NASDAQ crash to scare people into gold funds. Miners, he argued, still aren't priced for $4,500 gold, let alone the $5,500 briefly seen in January, "because the market didn't believe the gold price was going to stay at those levels." His pick for best capital allocator among the producers: Agnico Eagle.

A word of caution on the leverage. Fund manager David Finch of Ixios, on Money of Mine (Sept 12), described gold as "a rocket with several stages," first central-bank buying (triggered by the sanctions on Russia), now the debasement trade "gaining momentum all the time." His interesting nuance: during the February-to-August correction, the miners' usual amplified downside was surprisingly muted, gold stocks "held up very well." But he flagged a coming "political battle over where the gold price goes," since an $8,000 gold price "is not in the U.S.'s interest… and probably is in China's."

Fund flows to watch. Mining Stock Daily (Sept 15) reported that the junior-miner ETF GDXJ added 44 new companies in a major rebalancing, broadening its reach into smaller names, and that royalty firm Elemental acquired Vizsla Royalties one day after being added to the index.

Silver and the miner "re-rating"

If there was a bullish tell this week, it was silver and the miners quietly refusing to fall.

Technician Michael Oliver made the structural case on Commodity Culture: "Silver 'Won't Stop' at $500" (Sept 12). His "most important chart" tracks the gold-miner index (XAU) relative to gold. For 13 years the miners have been stuck near the bottom of their historic range, as low as 4% of an ounce of gold, versus a normal 18–35%, even while earning record profits. That ratio just broke out above 9%. His conclusion: the miners could double relative to gold simply to reach the low end of their old range, and because gold itself should keep rising, the miners might "triple or more in price." If gold merely matches its two prior eight-fold bull runs, he notes, it lands at $8,000–$9,000. His silver call is even louder, he's pulled his old "$300 to $500" target, "not because I think it's not going to get there, but because I'm not sure it's going to stop there."

Francis Hunt (The Market Sniper) echoed the silver breakout on Palisades, describing silver as "literally just ripping" after breaking out of a falling-wedge pattern, though he cautions the metals likely finish the year in a range (below ~$5,600 gold and ~$121 silver, but above the recent lows).

For a near-term reality check, mining-newsletter writer Sean Brodrick on The KE Report (Sept 16) reminded listeners why the metals stalled: "what really took the wind out of the sails… was the fact that inflation data came in hot," raising fears the Fed keeps hiking. His base case is constructive but patient, "gold is near support… we aren't that far from the next rally," but he concedes "there is more room for more downside" if oil keeps feeding inflation. Dave Erfle, on a separate KE Report segment (Sept 15), focused on the specific price levels to watch in gold, GDX, GDXJ and silver.

The pundit scoreboard

Where the forecasters see this going, in one place:

  • Rick Rule (operator): dollar loses 75% of its purchasing power over a decade; own the highest-quality miners.
  • Luke Gromen: 40% gold allocation; "ninth-inning" gold moving $100–300 a day.
  • Michael Oliver: gold $8,000–$9,000; silver $300–$500+; miners double vs. gold.
  • Jim Rickards: still bullish, ~$20,000 long-term on geopolitics and inflation, while insisting "the end of the dollar" chatter is overblown.
  • Chris Whalen: $6,000–$7,000 gold, but only with a fresh fiscal catalyst.
  • Peter Schiff, on Bitcoin Magazine's BMTV (Sept 16): the bond bear market "has a long way to go," with the 10-year headed "a lot higher than 6%"; a quarter-point hike is "too little, too late"; central banks keep rotating out of Treasuries into gold.
  • Porter Stansberry, on Market Disruptors (Sept 15): "half of all the money in the monetary system was created since 2020"; the long bond is down ~60% in five years ("the worst bond performance in the history of the U.S. Treasury market"); he dates a genuine monetary reset to around 2029, when public debt crosses 100% of GDP and Social Security's shortfall becomes undeniable; the bond market "breaks first," likely when the 10-year clears ~6%.

What we didn't hear this week (in the interest of honesty)

A few gaps worth naming, so you know what this issue doesn't cover:

  • No dedicated platinum or palladium episodes at all, a genuine blank this week, even though palladium was among the weaker metals.
  • No single-company deep-dive on the big royalty names (Franco-Nevada, Wheaton, Royal Gold); they came up only through Rick Rule and the silver-ETF discussion.
  • No standalone Newmont, Agnico or Barrick episode, the majors appeared only via the Nevada joint-venture analysis and capital-allocation asides.
  • Central-bank buying figures were anecdotal (China's 80 tons year-to-date via Sprott's guest), with no fresh official monthly tally.
  • Several regular voices (Lyn Alden, Brent Johnson, Tavi Costa, Adrian Day, David Morgan) did not appear in the seven-day window. (Two podcast listings this week were mislabeled, tagging a Chris Whalen interview as "Brent Johnson" and a Wealthion fund manager as "David Morgan"; we listened to the actual audio and corrected both before quoting.)

The through-line this week: the Fed finally did the thing that was supposed to hurt gold, and gold held its ground while silver gained. Whether that's the market pricing in "money-printing is coming anyway" or just a quiet consolidation before the next move, the operators are using the lull to accumulate, and the forecasters are, if anything, more strident than a month ago. We'll see next Thursday whether the calm holds.