Investors Are So Confident in the Trump Economy They’re Turning to Gold
The president promised a “golden age,” but Americans buying actual gold to hedge against an unstable economy is probably not what he had in mind.
Gold—it’s not only the decoration of choice for Donald Trump’s White House, but, it seems, the asset of choice for investors skittish about the economy he’s overseeing.
Gold prices have been surging lately, climbing to a record high Tuesday amid declining value of the US dollar, political instability, and anxiety over the president’s signature tariffs—the latest sign that his economy may not exactly be the “miracle” he promised he’d deliver on the campaign trail.
“Investors turn to gold not only for its historical role as a safe haven, but also for its ability to hedge against inflation, currency volatility, and geopolitical risk,” said Juan Carlos Artigas, regional CEO (Americas) and global head of research for the World Gold Council. “While rising gold prices don’t guarantee economic headwinds, they often signal that investors are preparing for them.”
The alarm bells have been ringing loudly since this summer, when a bruising Bureau of Labor Statistics report showed the worst three-month stretch of hiring since the pandemic. Trump, furious at the numbers, fired the BLS commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, insisting that she had manipulated the data for “political purposes.”
“In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,” Trump posted on his social media site in August, taking a shot at Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell for good measure. (After her firing, McEntarfer told an audience at an event at Bard College, “Firing your chief statisticians for releasing data you do not like, it has serious economic consequences.”)
Trump, of course, had been browbeating Powell about cutting interest rates—threatening to fire him, and seeking to oust a Fed governor as part of an apparent effort to exert more control over the independent body. (The governor—Lisa Cook—has contested Trump’s allegations of mortgage fraud and sued Trump, and the courts have blocked her firing so far.) The Fed finally did cut rates last week, but only after another troubling sign for the economy: a revised hiring estimate from the BLS that showed 911,000 fewer jobs had been added to the economy in the year ending in March 2025.
Trump has insisted that everything is running smoothly. “We are, as a country, as you know, doing unbelievably well,” he said at a state dinner hosted by King Charles in the United Kingdom last week. “We had a very sick country one year ago. And today, I believe we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world. In fact, nobody is even questioning it.”
A good many people do seem to be questioning that though: The economy, a signature issue of Trump’s winning 2024 campaign, appears to be turning into a polling vulnerability for him. Two of his most significant economic initiatives—his belligerent tariff regime, and the “Big Beautiful Bill” his Republican majorities rammed through on the Hill this summer—appear to be broadly unpopular with the American public. And his overall approval rating is underwater. His gilded White House—“That’s all 24-karat,” he has bragged of his redecorated Oval Office—doesn’t seem to reflect the mood of most everyday Americans, whom he’d promised in his campaign to rescue from their economic precarity.
Back then, he said he would usher in a “golden age” in America. In one sense, that’s true: Investors seem so confident in the economy he’s overseeing that they’re turning to gold.
