September 21, 2026 – GoldSilver interview with Jim Rickards, editor of Strategic Intelligence and author of Money GPT
Jim Rickards told GoldSilver host Maggie Lake that gold will reach $10,000 an ounce "sooner than most people expect," putting the window at late 2026 to mid-2027, "whether it's three months or six months." Five- and 10-year forecasts, he said, "don't mean very much for investor allocations today." The target sits well above the consensus among gold bulls. Lake noted that most of the bullish investors she speaks to agree with the fundamentals but have far more conservative targets. The call rests on a mix of a mathematical argument about price increments, a view that the Federal Reserve has just made a policy error, and a thesis that supply-driven inflation will end in recession and lower rates.
The Anchoring Argument: Why Each $1,000 Gets Easier
Rickards' main explanation for the gap between his target and the consensus is behavioral. He argued that investors anchor on the dollar size of each move, $1,000 steps that took a long time between $3,000 and $5,000, and extrapolate that pace forward. "Each $1,000 increment is easier than the one before because you're working off a higher base and it's a smaller percentage gain," he said. "When you go from $3,000 to $4,000, that's a 33% increase. That's a heavy lift. But when you go from $9,000 to $10,000, that's only an 11% increase. That's like a couple of weeks trading, the way the volatility is today."
His conclusion is that "when you get to six or seven, it'll go to eight, nine, 10 really quickly." Rickards conceded that this is partly a charting effect and that a logarithmic chart "would be a much less steep gain." Still, he argued that market psychology follows the dollar amounts rather than the percentages. The argument explains a time horizon, but it does not by itself supply a catalyst, and the rest of the case has to do that work.
The Fed Hike as a "Blunder"
The most contrarian element is his reading of monetary policy. Rickards called the Fed's quarter-point increase in the federal funds target to 4% under new Chair Kevin Warsh "very disappointing" and "a blunder." He argued that the inflation in question is cost-push inflation from oil, diesel, grain and other supply disruptions, which monetary policy cannot fix. He also said the funds rate acts on "a market that scarcely exists," because banks hold trillions of dollars of excess reserves. "They raise interest rates one quarter of 1% on a market that doesn't exist, and somehow that's supposed to affect the price of oil. Of course not."
In his framework, supply shocks tend to extinguish themselves. Demand for gasoline and diesel is inelastic, so higher pump prices pull money out of discretionary spending and slow the economy on their own. Adding a rate increase, he said, "probably set us up for a worse recession." He cited 1974, when a recession followed the oil shock while Gerald Ford and Alan Greenspan handed out "Whip Inflation Now" buttons, and he also pointed to 1990. Rickards was explicit that he does not view this as a good outcome, noting that it raises unemployment and shuts businesses. But he said it "cures the inflation." The gold implication, as he began to lay it out at the end of the discussion, is that inflation then falls, interest rates come back down, and the main headwind to gold eases.
Real Rates, Not Nominal Rates
Rickards pushed back on the idea that a 4% to 4.5% yield on short-dated Treasuries makes gold unattractive. He argued that investors should look at real rates. With inflation at roughly 3.5%, the real funds rate is about positive 0.5% and the real yield on a two-year note is about 50 basis points. He put the 10-year real yield at about 1.5%, and he noted the 10-year is set by institutional buyers rather than by the Fed. He added that it is the more relevant benchmark for mortgages, corporate bonds and construction lending.
The historical comparison he offered was January 1980, when gold peaked at $800 an ounce, up from $35 nine years earlier, while nominal rates were 13% to 14%. Real rates matter, he said, and he does not dismiss them as a headwind, but today's levels are not prohibitive. His own 1980 mortgage at 13% was effectively negative in real, after-tax terms, which he used as an illustration. The weakness in this argument is that his inflation figure is an estimate and his forecast depends on inflation rising further. If it did not, the real-rate cushion for gold would shrink.
Three Sources of Inflation, and a Fiscal Problem
Rickards identified three inflation drivers: supply-side cost push, demand pull driven by expectations and behavior, and fiscal policy. On the last, he said the US economy has a real growth constraint of about 3.5% and is currently running a little below it, so added government spending produces inflation because "there's nowhere else for the money to go." He attributed the 9.1% peak in June 2022 to roughly $3 trillion of stimulus in 2020 and 2021 under both Trump and Biden. He said new spending tied to the war with Iran and, to a lesser extent, Ukraine is reintroducing that pressure in 2026. Lake noted that fiscal expansion is the one thing both parties agree on. Rickards replied that this is "exactly right," and that it is also a cause of inflation.
The Drawdown Framework That Called the Low
Rickards used the interview to defend his track record in this cycle. Gold reached $5,400 an ounce in January 2026 and then fell to a low near $3,900. In an article around May, he applied a method he learned from Jim Rogers about a decade ago: no commodity "goes to the moon without a 50% drawdown along the way." Rogers' approach measures the drawdown from a prior peak relative to an earlier base price. Rickards said it worked in the 2011 to 2015 decline, where it identified the December 2015 low within about $20 an ounce. Applied to the current cycle, he estimated a bottom around $3,600 against the actual low of about $3,900.
Rickards acknowledged the exercise is "admittedly a little bit arbitrary" because the result depends on the base chosen, and that it is not technical analysis so much as historical behavior updated with "fractal mathematics." The method missed the low by roughly $300, and he described it as being in the right "zip code." A $300 error is about 8%, which is a meaningful gap for a tool presented as rigorous.
Central Banks and Flat Supply
On fundamentals, Rickards pointed to continued net central bank buying, led by China but also including Kazakhstan, Vietnam, Mexico, the Philippines and Turkey, against mine output he described as flat at about 4,600 tons a year. He said that new rich veins are getting "deeper and further and fewer and further between." Rickards, who said he invests in a few gold mines, does not claim peak gold.
His view is that central banks put "a soft floor, maybe a little bit harder than that" under the price rather than driving it higher, because they are buyers who prefer low prices and "see a dip, they buy it." He said China's disclosed reserves are about 3,000 metric tons at the People's Bank of China, up from 600 in 2009. He believes holdings through the State Administration of Foreign Exchange and other off-balance-sheet channels could bring the total to as much as 6,000 tons, "closing in on the United States" at 8,133 metric tons. He acknowledged that no one knows for sure and that his estimate comes from Swiss export and Hong Kong import data, in which private and official demand are difficult to separate.
Geopolitics Pointing to Higher Inflation
Rickards described a widening Middle East conflict that is no longer limited to the US and Iran. He said the Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed, with only limited oil getting through. Saudi Arabia's cross-peninsula pipeline to the Red Sea, which was carrying about 3 million barrels a day against roughly 20 million before the conflict, was attacked by Iranian-aligned Iraqi groups. The Houthis, he said, have captured an island in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and now effectively control the Red Sea and, by extension, access to the Suez Canal. In Ukraine, he said, the Black Sea is closed and Russian strikes on Odessa are blocking grain exports, which he sees as adding to food inflation. He also flagged helium supply, which is needed for semiconductor production. These claims come from Rickards and were not independently verified in the discussion.