I love the smell of flaming fiat in the morning.

On Monday, gold added to what was already a double-digit gain in 2026, breaching $5,000 in the process. And to think, I’m old enough to remember when prices first cleared $4,000. (That was less than four months ago.)

If there were any questions as to whether gold still retains its appeal as a haven despite the “barbarous relic” libel — sorry, label — we can consider those questions answered in the affirmative.

Assuming Monday’s gain held, it’d be the seventh consecutive daily advance. If gold manages another weekly gain, it’d be the seventh in eight.

If you’re keeping track at home, gold’s up more than 150% on a rolling two-year window. The chart above gives you a sense of how escalatory this rally was. And still is.

The 14-week RSI was near 80 again on Monday. It’s been above 70 since September. The 14-day RSI, at an eye-watering 85, was the highest since October and among the highest readings on record, indicative of the most overbought conditions in half a century.

As I wrote this month in “Fiat Fatigue And A World On Fire (Why Gold Keeps Rising)“, gold aficionados can usually regale you with a lot of inside-baseball color to illuminate gold’s ongoing luster, but in the current circumstances we could do worse than consulting Occam’s razor: Policy uncertainty in the US is off the charts, and the US issues the reserve currency.

The figure shows you the most widely-cited economic policy uncertainty index, compiled by Scott Baker, Nick Bloom and Steven Davis. It’s news-based, so currently it’s picking up what one columnist recently described as Donald Trump’s “addiction to drama,” which naturally manifests as a never-ending firehose of soap-operatic headlines.

Note that the daily print on that index from Sunday was 729, presumably a reflection of the bloody melee in Minneapolis and the prospect of another US government shutdown. That was the highest print since the insane-a-thon around “Liberation Day.”

Gold’s registering all of that, and relatedly, it’s acting like the anti-dollar trade bullion bulls insist it is by nature.

There’s the simple bar chart showing you a quarter century of annual gold returns. This rally’s unprecedented in scope, if not in length.

For whatever it’s worth to you, the pros who responded to the January installment of BofA’s popular fund manager poll identified gold as the most crowded trade for the first time since the October run-up.

Note from the figure below that it wasn’t close in this month’s survey.

51% of the vote was nearly double the share gold garnered in December. In the same poll, a net 45% of investors said gold’s overvalued. That’s a record.

Another fun fact: “Long gold” was identified as the most crowded trade in five of the 12 BofA fund manager polls conducted since Trump took office for the second time.

And yet, as the bank’s Michael Hartnett’s been keen to note at various intervals since gold went parabolic several months back, the history of gold bull markets suggests prices could run to $6,000 before they collapse under their own weight.