Maria Aspan

Gold has just been on this record-breaking tear.

And now the price has been going up for a few years, but last year was the best year for gold since 1979.

It's sometimes called part of the fear trade.

So in the past year, we've had a trade war.

We've had a real war in Iran.

We've had an energy crisis where we've seen concerns about inflation still not being under control.

And gold is often seen as a hedge against all of that.

Yeah.

And actually, it's not even the U.S.

It's central banks around the world have traditionally held a lot of their reserves in U.S.

dollars.

And last year, especially between President Trump slapping a whole bunch of tariffs on almost everything the U.S.

imports, as well as some of his threats to the Federal Reserve's independence, all of that increased.

yielded what was known as a sell America trade.

In other words, like countries around the world, governments around the world started worrying about the safety and security of the U.S.

government and the U.S.

system and started rethinking whether they wanted to hold as many of their reserves in U.S.

dollars.

And we saw many central banks sell some dollars and swap to gold.

So that contributed to driving the price of gold up.