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$10,000 GOLD By Year-End 'Intact' as Crisis 'Worse Than 2008' Incoming: James Rickards

Commodity Culture Jul 3, 2026

Summary

Gold's drawdown looks like a dollar-liquidity squeeze rather than a fundamental break: central bank buying, flat mine supply and inflation concerns all held.

The guest argues gold passed Treasuries as a share of global reserves because the price roughly tripled, not because central banks bought dramatically more.

A 50% drawdown rule borrowed from Jim Rogers and extended with fractal scale invariance frames the correction as normal commodity cycle behavior.

He reads escalating backstops, Treasuries guaranteed at par and deposits insured without limit, as signal that a crisis bigger than the Fed is near.

His defensive allocation: 10% gold, 30% cash for optionality, income-producing real estate and short-dated notes, avoiding AI and software names.

James Rickards's takeaways

  • Top takeaway The guest calls the recent gold correction a good entry point and says his intermediate target of $10,000 an ounce, late this year or early next, is still intact after gold fell from a January high near $5,355 to around $4,000.
  • He attributes the drawdown to a dollar shortage rather than inflation or central-bank allocation: countries including Turkey, Russia and, to some extent, China sold gold to raise dollars to buy oil after the Persian Gulf blockade, and stop-loss and trend-following selling then extended the decline.
  • Applying Jim Rogers' rule that nothing in commodities rises without a 50% drawdown, together with fractal scale invariance, he calculates roughly $3,600 from the $5,355 peak and says gold reaching that level would not surprise him.
  • He argues central banks are buying gold mainly as a geopolitical hedge, because physical bullion in a country's own vaults cannot be frozen or seized by the US the way Western holdings of Russian reserves were, and says the US has moved from freezing assets to trying to seize them.
  • He expects a financial crisis greater than 2008 and one becoming bigger than the Fed, and would hold 10% gold, 30% cash and Treasury notes as rates fall toward 1-2%, while avoiding AI, hyperscalers and software in favour of energy, defense, healthcare and mining.