Dear Reader,
This is Dylan Jovine with Behind the Markets.
Happy Thursday. Today is Thursday, March 19th, and it is pouring in South Florida so I have to wear my rain jacket.
Anyway, today I'd like to talk about a report from the World Gold Council that proves gold has officially dethroned the US dollar as the world's reserve currency. What a shame. What an actual, absolute shame.
For the first time in 30 years, gold has surpassed the dollar as the world's number one reserve asset.
As of early 2026, central banks around the globe held approximately $4 trillion in gold — greater than the $3.9 trillion held in US treasuries. And this shift underscores something fundamental about the change we're watching happen in real time.
A lot of very rich, very famous, very smart people have argued the same thing I'm about to say: the dollar losing its place as the world's reserve currency would be worse for the United States than losing any war.
Immediately, everything priced in dollars — which is everything — would be repriced roughly 30% downward. And what makes this so dangerous is that it doesn't happen all at once. It's like the frog in the boiling pot. You don't throw the frog into boiling water — it jumps right out. Instead, the water starts warm and comfortable, and the heat gets turned up so slowly that before you know it, the frog is burned alive. That is what is happening right now to Americans.
What most people still don't understand is that this isn't just a story about gold going up.
It's also a story about the old paper-gold system losing control of the market.
That's the entire premise behind a report I published called The End of the Gold Cartel — and why I believe one under-the-radar gold company could become one of the biggest beneficiaries if this break continues.
You can get the full story here.
So how did we get here? How are we blowing such a wonderful privilege? Because that's what this is — a privilege. The world's reserve currency has kept our interest rates low, kept our stock market high, and is responsible for roughly a third of your net worth. Imagine your net worth being worth a third less. That's what's at stake.
There are two major things that brought us to this point.
It started in 2016 with Trump's election.
I'm not going to sugarcoat it. In his first term, he added $7.4 trillion in debt. Biden, not to be outdone, came very close to matching that with $7.2 trillion. And Trump looks set to add roughly $8 trillion more in this term.
What that means practically is that foreign investors are looking at US treasuries and saying, we don't want these.
If we buy a treasury with a 4% coupon for 30 years, and you keep borrowing and borrowing and borrowing, inflation is going to eat up that fixed coupon. Our $40,000 a year in interest isn't going to be worth anything in 30 years because you're printing so much money. Nobody who manages serious money would lend the US government long-term right now. And that started showing up in central bank gold buying as far back as 2016 — we wrote about it in our Death of the Dollar report in 2022, and it was already well underway.
The second mistake was Biden freezing Russia's central bank assets during the invasion of Ukraine. That was a catastrophic unforced error. Because China — our primary competitor — went around to every country it could find and made the argument: you see what the United States does?
If you hold your reserves in dollars and you do something they don't like, they'll just freeze your assets. You can't trust them. So move your money. And when countries pushed back and said they didn't want yuan because of capital controls, China had a simple answer: then put your money in gold. China has been playing this geopolitical chess match deliberately, and we handed them the opening.
Two unforced errors, as they say in tennis. Bipartisan ones, I should add — because the only thing both parties have ever agreed on is spending money. Anyone who tells you differently isn't being straight with you.
The tragedy is that we're not going to feel this day to day.
It's not like 9/11 — I was there, and that was a one-day before-and-after moment where the world just changed. This is the slow boil. And unfortunately, unless something serious changes with how our elected leaders approach spending, this isn't going to reverse itself anytime soon.
Anyway, that's all I have. Have a good day. I'll see you tomorrow.
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