Even Banks Now Bow To A Golden Master

Authored by Matthew Piepenburg via VonGreyerz.gold,

Although I never expected to say this, if you are still wondering about gold’s future price direction, just ask the big banks…

Getting Real

Emerging from a 2025 in which gold saw 53 all-time-highs and an annual move of 55%, some wondered if this was just another blow-off asset akin to any other, from dot.com stocks to crypto manias.

Such a misunderstanding of gold’s fundamental profile as a strategic monetary metal gained a bit more momentum on Silver Friday, when the CME engineered yet another temporary and entirely artificial price dip/manipulation to bail out the big banks caught in the mother of all silver short-squeezes.

This was not an end to the rise of precious metals, but a capitulation by the COMEX short-sellers (i.e. bullion banks) to get out their surging way.

Of course, when it comes to the legalized fraud in the COMEX or an openly rigged banking system, my thoughts, pen and voice have been consistently and transparently unkind.

Ever since insiders like Larry Summers helped to repeal Glass Steagall and effectively turn commercial banks into levered portfolio managers using depositor funds, the fractional reserve banking system became anything but a trusted counter-party for so-called “wealth management” in general or gold ownership in particular.

In other words, when it came to understanding gold, banks were the last place to find an honest broker or candid price projection.

The great irony behind all the recent bank squeezes and Comex mechanizations, however, is that they signaled an otherwise carefully hidden truth, namely: The big banks already knew that gold’s price moves had only just begun.

The Big Banks: From Gold Deniers to Gold Buyers

For decades, of course, bankers intentionally downplayed gold for obvious and self-serving reasons.

First, gold’s price direction was a direct threat to the “King Dollar” narrative which every banker from the BIS and the Fed to JP Morgan relied upon to compliantly ensure their employment.

Secondly, pushing gold, or even bank gold storage, was not nearly as profitable as pushing the far riskier yet consensus-safe template of topping private equity bubbles and cancerously sick private credit pools.

But as we enter 2026, the greater irony is that even the big banks can no longer hide what sophisticated gold investors have always known, namely: Rock now beats paper.

A Gold New World

In world in which fiat currencies are quantifiably and objectively melting like an ice cube under the heat of over $354T in global private and public debt, as well as $38T of embarrassing U.S. sovereign debt, the jig is up on the declining purchasing power of the paper currencies by which wealth is falsely (and dangerously) measured.

Gold, alas, is not a “rising trend,” it’s the de-facto new Tier-1, primary reserve asset and FX reserve currency in a changing world openly losing trust in paper currencies and sovereign IOUs.

In this changing world, the banks have been forced to change as well.

In 2025, for example, even Morgan Stanley, once fined for illegal price manipulation in precious metals, was suddenly yet correctly recommending a 20% allocation to gold over the “return-free-risk” of USTs.

The Latest from the Big Boys

Even more telling, however, are the still media-ignored messages percolating out of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan.

Goldman, for example, just made its 2026 year-end forecast for gold at $5400. Key to note, is that Goldman was careful to call this a “forecast” rather than “target.” This is because they wanted to avoid appearing too bullish.

But Goldman deliberately added the words “with significant upside risk” to their forecast, which translates to they actually expect a much higher year-end price move.

JP Morgan spoke far more directly/bullishly, announcing a $6300 gold price as their “base case” for year end, and went on to confess an upside as high as $8500.

Folks, seeing such gold price confessions from two pillars of a banking system historically terrified of rising gold is beyond telling; it’s in fact revolutionary in its implications.

To see banks suddenly joining the gold narrative is not only a confession of the dollar’s declining global role, it’s a signal of a global financial system in open flux.

In other words, even the big banks can no longer ignore the signals we have been revealing for years.

Seeing What We’ve Always Known

This is especially true of the open breakdown in the COMEX exchange, a devolution we’ve been tracking well ahead of their public learning curve.

With precious metals pouring out of the COMEX to a world openly thirsty for physical gold and silver, the exchange simply lacks enough of the physical metals to lever prices effectively downwards.

Take the COMEX silver inventories, which have fallen to 82M ounces. That’s a 75% decline from 2020.

Equally beyond denial for the commercial banks like Goldman and JP Morgan, is the dramatic stacking of physical gold by the world’s central banks, another bank-ignored fact we’ve been tracking for years.

Winds of Dramatic Change – From Dollar Debasement to Gold Stacking

Of course, the primary winds behind these changes had been obvious long before the TBTF banks finally admitted as much to themselves (or their clients).

The most obvious wind has been the hitherto ignored yet openly obvious matter of currency debasement.

When the M2 money supply skyrocketed 40% from $15T to 21T during the Covid hysteria, followed by another surge thereafter to $22T, was it really any surprise to see such an over-supplied dollar so debased (and hence your wealth so constructively stolen) by 2026?

Debasement, though bad for wealth preservation, sure is good for broke governments. Interest payments for Uncle Sam’s bar tab have grown by greater than 3X in the last five years, making it DC’s 2nd largest federal expenditure.

With U.S. debt at historically unprecedented as well as unpayable highs, such debt can be made worthless by making money more worthless—a win for Uncle Sam but open robbery for Joe Sixpack.

Gold, of course, has been quietly keeping score of this rigged game.

Relative to the M2 money supply, it is still grossly undervalued. The M2/gold ratio stands today at 4.5, not even close to the 2.5 level of the 1980’s, which means gold has a long way higher to go in price.

Further QE measures, which have already begun in 2026, will only add more dilution to the USD and more tailwinds to gold. In periods of excessive money printing, gold surges.

In the 1970’s, for example, gold rose 2300% (from $35 to $850). After the 2008 crisis, it moved upwards by 170% ($700-$1900), and during the Covid nightmare, shot up 40% (as the Fed’s balance sheet added $4.6T of mouse-clicked dollars) and would have traveled much further but for the then-current BTC hysteria, which distracted many…

More Winds…

Another wind of change, of course, has been the central bank gold stacking alluded to above. Ever since the watershed turning point in Q1 of 2022 when the US decided to weaponize the world’s neutral reserve currency, distrust in USDs and faith in gold has risen irrevocably higher.

Since that seminal event, and as we warned from day 1, central bank gold purchasing has risen by 5X, from 17 tons/month in 2022 to over 107 tons/month today.

Goldman Sachs estimates that for every 100 tons of gold purchases, gold’s price climbs by 2%.

Given that global central banks from Poland, China and Turkey to India and Russia will conservatively reach at least 750 tons annually, gold’s future price “forecasts” are not hard to measure.

Of course, such central bank buying doesn’t even include the retail sector, which is the last to catch on, ironically due to the fact that their bankers have been telling them for decades that gold was too volatile, despite the fact that it has outperformed the S&P in total return for a quarter of a century…

Despite record inflows to ETF gold in 2025, the average global allocation to gold is still less than 1%, and only just beginning to pick up towards prior median levels of 2%, or even prior highs of greater than 6%.

This growing retail trend (and awareness surge) will only add to gold’s longer-term and secular price momentum.

Bowing to a New Master

Based on these now obvious winds of change, gold’s direction is becoming far less of a debate or the contrarian trade of old.

Instead, the winds and signals in the gold market are calling paper money’s bluff. Gold is now emerging, as it always has throughout history, as a core allocation and superior store of value than paper promises or paper dollars.

As Gresham’s law reminds from as far back as the 1500’s, once investors are made to feel the difference between “good money” (gold and silver) and “bad money” (debased paper currencies) they eventually replace the later with the former.

What we have been tracking for years among the actions (rather than words) of the central bankers confirms this now undeniable pattern.

And what we are finally witnessing among the commercial banks today is that not even these former servants of paper products can deny the new direction of monetary metals.