Gold, who needs it?

You, maybe! And depending.

“US policy uncertainty and recent consolidation provide an attractive entry point” for gold, Goldman’s Daan Struyven, Samantha Dart and half a dozen other analysts wrote, in their year-ahead commodities outlook dated November 17. (It’s year-ahead outlook season. Brace yourself.)

The bank’s pretty convinced: The long gold view’s “high-conviction.” If nothing else (and there’s plenty in the “else” category), gold can probably count on “structural support” from central bank-buying and “cyclical support” from a Fed that’s cutting rates. Goldman’s year-end 2025 forecast for bullion’s $3,000.

Struyven and Dart said the mandate delivered to Donald Trump by the US electorate “widens the distribution of possible shifts in trade, energy and fiscal policy,” which in turn “strengthens the diversifying role of commodities in portfolios” for the new year.

No arguments there. Longtime readers know that although I don’t make a big deal of it, I’m overweight Energy as a geopolitical hedge, and my view on gold has never changed: It’s not good for much, but it can be an uncorrelated portfolio hedge. Further, whether it should be a store of value (i.e., an inflation hedge) is irrelevant if everyone thinks it is, and its inherent uselessness as a true doomsday put is irrelevant too because in the kind of apocalypse where gold loses its luster entirely, portfolio strategy will be the last of anyone’s concerns.

So, yeah: Long commodities. And particularly energy and gold. I’m with that strategic bent, just as long as it doesn’t veer into paranoid territory which, unfortunately, it tends to do among overzealous adherents.

The diagram on the left, below, will be familiar to some of you. Goldman’s used it before. It’s updated for “Trump 2.0.” In a nutshell: It shows you all the ways commodities can save your ass.

“Commodities typically perform well when macro shocks drive inflation,” Struyven and Dart wrote, adding that “late-cycle positive demand shocks [like] large tax cuts tend to boost inflation and commodity returns by depleting commodity inventories [while] losses in central bank credibility (e.g. political Fed interference) can boost inflation and erode the value of nominal assets, against which real commodity assets and especially gold offer wealth preservation.”

In other words: Hard assets can help when human behavior erodes the value of fiat. The figure on the right, above, serves as a reminder of how commodities performed during periods when inflation “surprises” undermined real returns for stocks and bonds.

Without wanting to short change Struyven and Dart, whose full 2025 commodities outlook clocks in at more than two-dozen pages, that really is the long and the short of it, no pun intended. They summed it up: “Long gold and oil positions can act as critical inflation and geopolitical hedges in tail scenarios, including tariff escalation (gold), geopolitical oil supply disruptions (oil
and likely gold) and debt fears.”