If you are trying to make sense of why gold and silver behaved the way they did in 2025, this conversation is worth your time.
Jan Skoyles recorded this interview with Alasdair Macleod in early-December, at a moment when record prices, official unease, and growing public anxiety are colliding. Gold has moved sharply higher. Silver has followed in a way that has unsettled parts of the market. At the same time, institutions that ignored precious metals for years have begun warning about “bubble conditions”, as if surprise alone were a policy argument.
Macleod’s view is that this framing misses the point.
The question, he argues, is not whether gold is expensive. It is what a rising gold price reveals about the health of a currency system built on debt, intervention, and managed confidence. In that context, gold is not leading events. It is responding to them. What looks like appreciation is, in reality, the steady erosion of purchasing power elsewhere.
In the interview, Macleod steps back from the noise of 2025 and places the moment in its longer historical setting. He traces today’s tensions to the post-Bretton Woods world, the political drift toward economic micromanagement, and the belief that deficits, liquidity, and confidence can be indefinitely managed without consequence. History suggests otherwise, and it is the sequence of events, rather than any single data point, that matters most.
Two pressure points dominate his analysis. The first is the extraordinary valuation gap in equity markets. The second is the behaviour of bond yields. It is not the initial rise in yields that tends to break markets, but the second surge, when risk is repriced and the cost of credit catches up with reality. When that happens, the policy response is familiar. Liquidity is injected, quantitative easing returns, and central bank balance sheets expand in an effort to stabilise markets. This may delay a reckoning, but it shifts the problem from asset prices to the currency itself.
The interview also addresses something that is often overlooked. Foreign holders own vast quantities of US assets. When confidence weakens, they do not wait patiently. They exit. Combined with aggressive monetary intervention at home, that behaviour has historically marked the transition from a market correction to a broader loss of trust in money.
Silver forms a substantial part of the discussion. Macleod argues that the current move is not simply speculative enthusiasm, but the result of tightening physical supply meeting inflexible industrial demand, particularly from India, with China quietly stepping back from its previous role as price suppressor. The mechanics of physical delivery, especially on COMEX, matter far more in this environment than most Western commentary acknowledges.
Macleod repeatedly brings the discussion with Jan Skoyles back to everyday experience. People may not follow bond yields, but they do notice that money buys less, more often, and that official explanations feel increasingly disconnected from reality. History suggests the public typically understands what is happening late in the process, not because they are inattentive, but because the language used to describe inflation and currency debasement has been deliberately obscured for decades.
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