Colonel Kurtz said:
Dollar is cooked
"Dollar is cooked" assumes the gold move is about imminent USD collapse. I don't think that's the right read.
The USD is still the dominant fiat. Most of the world still wants dollars. The issue isn't rejection it's access.
If you think of the dollar system structurally: force is the floor, credibility is the ceiling. The U.S. hasn't lost the floor. But repeated unwillingness to self-limit has eroded credibility, lowering the ceiling. That matters just not in the way collapse narratives suggest.
My base case is a fragmented, regionally focused global economy where many actors want USD exposure but can't reliably hold it.
That includes:
Countries under sanctions or sanction risk
Countries with capital controls
Countries whose reserves are politically vulnerable
Domestic savers trapped in closed financial systems
China is a clean example: strict capital controls, weak domestic growth, property stress, limited legal diversification, rising geopolitical risk.
In that environment, gold becomes the bridge, not the destination; portable, liquid, politically acceptable, outside the banking system, no counterparty risk.
Weaponizing the dollar infrastructure (SWIFT, reserves, settlement rails) especially after Ukraine normalized the idea that access is conditional. That didn't kill the dollar. It increased demand for a neutral buffer around it.
For Americans, gold is about preserving purchasing power until it's converted back into USD.
For non-USD actors, gold preserves the optionality to transact in dollars at all (or some currency other than their own).
Rising gold doesn't mean the dollar failed. It means the dollar is powerful and increasingly selective.
