Neal Freiman

It popped nearly 14% Monday in its biggest one-day gain since the financial crisis in 2008, before tumbling back down to earth in a historic reversal.

While several factors are boosting the volatility of precious metals,

The umbrella theme seems to be uncertainty, uncertainty over the Trump administration's tariffs, geopolitical adventures and attacks on the Fed, concern over rising debt loads among governments around the world, and worries that major currencies will decline as those governments fail to address deficits and try to inflation their way out of debt problems.

And what do you know?

The U.S.

dollar tumbled to a four month low yesterday.

All those jitters are causing a flight to safety to gold.

Humanity's comfort food dating back millennia.

And it's not exactly a good sign.

Some economists see the gold rally as a reflection of something profoundly rotten in the global economic order, claiming it heralds the start of a global debt crisis.

Robin Brooks, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former chief FX strategist at Goldman Sachs, called the rise in precious metals, quote, breathtaking and profoundly scary.

Yeah, I guess the question that traders have to suss out, is it a speculative main or is something more fundamental going underneath the surface?

And that's something more fundamental would be something called the debasement trade.

Now, the debasement trade is the expectation that governments are going to continue to devalue their currencies because of high debt, fiscal deficits and inflation, which means if you're an investor looking at all that, you're saying, OK, well, I'm going to get

into harder assets I'm going to hedge a little bit so often during a debasement trade you'll see assets like gold and real estate go up and also perhaps Bitcoin but if you looked at the debasement trade and wanted to bet on it and you put your money into Bitcoin instead of gold well you would have left

A lot of money on the table.

A number of prominent investors have come out saying, yes, the debasement trade is absolutely happening.

Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Associates, Ken Griffin of Citadel last year all said that there's what's happening is there's going to be a devaluation of the dollar of the U.S.

dollar.

Its prominence in the global stage is going to be diminished because of all these geopolitical events and perhaps some of the policymaking of the Trump administration.