This year has been remarkable for precious metals. Gold and silver have rewarded those who held them, and they have done so emphatically enough that even the people who usually treat bullion as a psychological condition have been forced to pay attention. It would be churlish to pretend that this is not gratifying for anyone who has spent years making the case for owning something solid in an age that prefers the convenience of abstraction.
But it would also be naïve to treat it as uncomplicated good news. A rising gold price has never been a pure celebration. It is a form of commentary. It does not offer reasons. It merely reflects what investors are willing to pay to reduce dependence on the smooth functioning of institutions, politics, and the promises that sit in between. To put it in one clear definition, and then stick to it: a trust asset is an asset that attracts marginal demand when confidence in policymakers, counterparties, and the durability of financial promises is thinning. Trust assets are not purchased because the future looks bright, but because it looks conditional, and because conditional futures make people think more carefully about the terms on which their wealth is held.
On that definition, gold has behaved like a trust asset all year, and silver has spent much of the year being dragged, sometimes reluctantly, into the same category. The interesting question is not whether that should make bullion holders feel clever, but what the year has done to the public’s understanding of risk. The answer, to my mind, is that 2025 has been a year of subtle disenchantment. Not the loud kind, not the sort that produces a single defining moment, but the slower recognition that the systems most people rely on are more political, more leveraged, and more improvisational than the marketing copy implies.
The monetary backdrop alone provided enough material for several lifetimes of reassurance, and still left investors uneasy. Inflation may have moderated in the official series, but the way people experience prices is stubborn, personal, and not easily talked out of existence. Meanwhile, the fiscal posture in much of the West continued to resemble an awkward compromise between the desire to appear responsible and the habit of behaving as though borrowing is a permanent subsidy. Central banks, asked to embody discipline, have increasingly looked like institutions managing constraints rather than commanding outcomes. None of this requires the melodrama of “currency collapse” to matter. It is enough that many households and businesses now treat monetary stability as something that must be defended, rather than assumed.
That changing mood has had several consequences, and one of the least sentimental is that official institutions have continued to accumulate gold. This tends to be described in polite commentary as “diversification”, which it is, but the word is too tidy for what is really going on. Gold does not depend on another sovereign’s promise. It is not a liability of a counterparty, and it does not require a friendly geopolitical environment to make itself useful. In a world where finance has become an instrument of policy, and policy has become increasingly comfortable with using financial access as leverage, reserve assets are not chosen purely for yield or convenience. They are chosen for survivability. Central bankers may speak the language of technocracy, but their portfolios often tell you what they fear.
For private investors, the year has also sharpened a distinction that is normally invisible until it becomes urgent: the difference between owning an asset and owning a claim on an asset. Most of modern finance is a hierarchy of claims. That hierarchy works extremely well when settlement is assumed, liquidity is abundant, and political conditions remain stable enough that everyone agrees on what counts as property. It becomes less comforting when those assumptions weaken. People do not need to believe in catastrophe to care about these mechanics. They only need to accept that systems fail in mundane ways: bottlenecks, legal disputes, policy surprises, freezes, controls, and the quiet sort of “exceptional measures” that always arrive with soothing language. The year has not been defined by a single dramatic rupture, but by the steady sense that the margin for friction is growing.
This is why the endless public debate about “paper versus physical” has been both muddled and revealing. Muddled, because it often collapses into slogans. Revealing, because the mere fact that so many people have become interested in the plumbing tells you something about the times. In calm markets, the average investor does not care how custody works, what “allocated” means, or how settlement behaves under stress. In uneasy markets, those questions become ordinary. They are not signs of paranoia. They are signs that trust has acquired a cost, and that more people are doing the unpleasant but sensible work of understanding where their wealth sits in the chain of promises.
Silver’s part in the story deserves its own attention, partly because it has moved in a way that is harder to dismiss, and partly because it reveals the oddness of the modern world. Silver has always been awkward precisely because it sits between monetary instinct and industrial reality. Gold can be held for the simple reason that you distrust the world. Silver complicates the picture because it is also a material input. It is pulled around by technology, supply chains, industrial policy, and the plain fact that mining cannot be expanded at will. This makes the silver market less forgiving when demand rises, and it makes price moves look “excessive” until one remembers how thin the market is relative to the forces pressing on it.
There is also a wider point here about the nature of modern “investment stories”. This year, more investors seemed to want assets that feel connected to something real, whether that is strategic materials, energy systems, data infrastructure, or the physical constraints of production. The market’s fascination with technology has not disappeared, but it has matured in a particular way. There is a growing preference for themes that can be explained without resorting to metaphysics, and silver, with its industrial uses and its monetary history, fits that mood unusually well. It is one of the few assets that can appeal simultaneously to the person who worries about monetary debasement and the person who worries about electrification bottlenecks. Those are not the same people, but they are living in the same year.
The Re-Monetisation of Silver Has Begun
Politics, too, has been a constant undertow, and it has mattered more than the day-to-day noise. Trade has continued to harden into strategy. Economic relationships increasingly look like instruments of statecraft rather than neutral channels of prosperity. Meanwhile, the broader atmosphere of geopolitical tension has made the world feel less governed by rules and more governed by contingencies. Markets can cope with bad news. What they struggle with is a sense that the framework itself is negotiable, and that institutions which once looked boringly reliable are being treated as tools rather than guardians. In those conditions, it is rational for investors to pay for optionality, and trust assets are one way of doing so.
There is a temptation, especially in a year like this, to turn precious metals into a morality play. Sensible people should resist that temptation. Gold and silver are not saints. They do not guarantee comfort. They can correct sharply, and they often do. They are also capable of disappointing holders who buy them for the wrong reasons, particularly if they expect them to behave like growth assets rather than insurance. Yet it remains true that trust assets are not held to maximise excitement. They are held to reduce dependence. The point is not to win the year. The point is to be less exposed to the single point of failure that is always invisible in good times and obvious in bad ones.
So, what is the appropriate tone for the final Friday Read of the year? Something between gratitude and sobriety. Gratitude, because it is human to feel relieved when preparation is vindicated. Sobriety, because the same forces that pushed gold and silver higher are not forces any serious person should greet with cheer. A rising gold price is comforting for the holder and uncomfortable for society. It suggests that trust has become a scarcer commodity, and that more people now feel the need to insure themselves against the decisions of institutions that insist they have everything under control.
That is not a festive conclusion, but it is an honest one. And honesty, like gold, tends to regain appeal when it has been undersupplied for long enough.
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