The Death of Gold in 2022 Was Grossly Exaggerated
On September 20, 2022, The Wall Street Journal ran an article which stated gold had lost its status as a “haven” of any sort – a crisis haven, a monetary haven or just a portfolio “balancer.” In that article, the Journal claimed gold “is on pace to decline for six consecutive months, with a loss of 14% through that period so far. That is a significant drop for an asset that is supposed to be a haven.”
At the time, gold was just under $1,660 per ounce. Gold closed 2022 at $1,820 per ounce. That’s when the major banks made their annual gold price projections. Some analysts also predicted Bitcoin – with its stellar 10-year track record – would soon replace gold, with its 6,000-year track record, as a monetary haven.
Here are a few sample “big bank” gold price projections for 2023, mostly made in late 2022:
• Bank of America predicted gold could reach – or even top – $2,000 an ounce in 2023.
• Citigroup expected gold prices to “break out” by mid-2023 and average over $1,900.
• ING was more bearish, expecting gold to average around $1,680 in mid-year 2023.
For a while, these neutral forecasts looked smart, as gold was flat and Bitcoin was volatile but generally rising. Then, a major escalation of war in the Middle East started moving gold up after Hamas invaded Israel on October 7, 2023. Gold began a steady rise – tripling in the next 2-plus years. October 2023 was also the month I met with Steve Forbes. He and I agreed gold would likely reach over $2,500 in 2024 and perhaps higher under the right circumstances.
Meanwhile, the major mainstream big banks in Europe and America continued to be conservative about gold’s future: In late 2023, the World Bank predicted gold would average only $1,950 per ounce in 2024, and in mid-January 2024, the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) published its annual prediction for gold in 2024. Their average projection was $2,059, a 6% rise over the 2023 average.
It turns out gold averaged $2,386 in 2024 and reached a peak price of over $2,600 in July of 2024. So, it turns out Steve Forbes and I were right on the money but the world’s greatest professionals (who are also biased in favor of paper money) couldn’t see the value of gold, echoing the Journal’s obituary in 2022.
By late 2024, the major banks were chastened by their failures to predict gold’s 2024 rise, so they were more bullish in 2025. Despite this, none came close to what actually happened, as most banks expected $3,500 to $4,000 gold early in the year. Later, they kept “inching up” their gold price forecasts during the year, as gold kept soaring. The LBMA’s average forecast for gold in 2025 was $2,735, more ambitious than in 2024, but the actual average 2025 price was $3,432, a 44% gain over the average price of $2,386 in 2024. Their expert opinions likely cost their clients and investors tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, by not giving gold more credit than they did. Had those same investors been reading our weekly Metals Market Report, they might have made better financial decisions and bought gold rather than putting more money into stocks, as most major banks recommended.
In summary, let’s return to the Wall Street Journal’s premature conclusion on the “death of gold” in 2022. Let’s see how four major candidates for “monetary haven” have performed since 2022 – since that is the year Russia invaded Ukraine. Let’s back up to the week before that war began, to give us four full years:
What About These Experts’ Predictions for Gold in 2026?
Will some of these professional geniuses finally become gold bugs in 2026? Not likely. It turns out they are predicting, once again, that by year’s end, gold will not reach the levels it has already reached in January of 2026!
For instance, the LBMA poll of 28 professional commodity analysts was made on January 12 and published on January 19. Most of these analysts (18 of 28) predicted an annual gold high below $5,400 –well below where gold traded the very next week, hitting at an intra-day peak of $5,586 on January 29, 2026!
In another poll of 30 analysts by Reuters, the median (mid-point) forecast for gold’s price in 2026 was $4,746.50. That is well below its January average. Among the major New York banks we’ve covered here, the leading experts forecast gold’s average at between $4,600 and $5,055 for the full year of 2026:
They have a certain “sameness” in predicting that gold will be right about where it was in mid-January.
More recently, J.P. Morgan has upped their 2026 gold projection to $6,300 an ounce and UBS predicted gold will reach $5,900 by the end of 2026.
We’ll see if they are too conservative again in 2026. So far, Louis Navellier has joined us in predicting $7,000 gold this year and potentially $10,000 by 2029, if circumstances unfold as we expect. Economist Ed Yardeni, also sees $10,000 gold by 2029, but he limits his 2026 prediction to $6,000 – still well above the Wall Street average prediction.
The 1914-S $10 Indian in MS-63 is our pick for coin of the week.
With a low mintage of only 208,000 coins and great capitalization (grading service population multiplied by price), this San Francisco Mint beauty has been a recommended coin since the inception of our 20/20 Program.
We have only a couple of these rarely seen coins in MS-63, far better specimens than the almost uncirculated example in the National Numismatic Collection at the Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. We expect this coin to continue to increase in value over the next five years.
The $10 Indian was one of only two gold coins designed by the famous sculptor Augustus Saint Gaudens, acting on the direction of President Theodore Roosevelt to improve the artistry of our nation’s coin designs.
Gold and silver are still up by double digits during the first seven weeks of 2026, with gold at a positive 16%, while stocks are basically flat. Last year’s stronger indexes, the S&P 500 and NASDAQ, are down so far this year, while last year’s lagging stock market index, the Dow Jones Industrials, is up about 3%.