Marketplace All-in-One
Financial data clashes and what it means for Zelle, Venmo, and more
22 Dec 2025
Why is gold hitting new records?
Why gold is hitting new records from Marketplace. I'm Sabri Beneshour in for David Brancaccio. As the U.S. seizes another Venezuelan oil tanker, the price of gold is hitting fresh records. Right now it's up 1.5 percent this morning. The two are slightly connected. Julia Coronado is founder and president of Macro Policy Perspectives and a professor at UT Austin.
She joins us as she does on Mondays. Hi, Julia. Good morning. So gold, if current trends keep up, will be up more than 66% in a year, largest rise since 1979. That's crazy. Why is that happening?
Well, gold generally benefits from worries about instability, and particularly in a world where there are growing concerns about the dollar, gold has an extra dose of safe haven status and really has been rallying off and on all year with some force. Why might the dollar be a point of concern this year? Well, the U.S. has traditionally been the bulwark of stability in the world.
And certainly the dollar still has the reserve currency status in the global economy. But we are not a bulwark of stability. You know, Venezuela is the latest geopolitical tension causing a flight to safety. And just in general, concerns about U.S. credibility and role in the global economy is certainly being tested this year. Tomorrow, we're going to get GDP data for the third quarter.
Last week, we got a whole ton of different delayed data from inflation to jobs. Do we have a clear sense of where the economy is at, having had the opportunity to sift through all of this? Yeah. No, we don't have a clear sense. The data was rather messy. The labor market is definitely soft.
And inflation, there was a missing month and some assumptions were made that kept inflation on the low side. So I don't think we have a real clear picture of the state of the U.S. economy. The inflation being understated, one explanation I heard was that the collection of price data started late in November around when Black Friday discounts were just coming into being. Is that right?
That's part of the issue, yes, that if you concentrate your data collection in the second half of November when all the sales are going to look like prices are lower. So, yes, that is one issue. Another issue was that they were missing October and some of the assumptions they made basically assumed zero inflation in October, which, of course, is probably an understatement of the reality.
All right, Julia Coronado, founder and president of Macro Policy Perspectives. Thanks, as always. My pleasure. Should banks be able to share your financial data if you want them to? For example, if you want to share your bank account information to use Venmo or Cash App or Google Pay to send money or to use some outside financial tech service.
Under the Biden administration, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said banks do have to share your data if you want them to. Under the Trump administration, it's considering ruling they don't. So what would that mean exactly? Steve Boms is founder and president of Elan Advocacy.
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