In the 18th Century, Britain discovered a modern miracle: a financial scheme that promised safety, yield, and national prosperity all at once. The South Sea Company would refinance government debt, enrich the public, and, by the logic of the day, turn paper into something close to certainty. Share prices rose, confidence rose faster, and for a brief period the country behaved as if wealth could be conjured simply by agreeing it existed.
Then the spell broke. Not because greed was invented in 1720, but because reality has always been undefeated. The deeper lesson wasn’t merely that bubbles burst. It was that people confuse a claim on wealth with wealth itself, and they only notice the difference when trust begins to wobble.
Three centuries later, we have better branding and more sophisticated plumbing, but the central issue remains intact. We live in a world where “safe” is often a category label rather than a description of substance. “Cash” is frequently not cash. “Liquidity” is often an assumption. “Low risk” can mean “low risk under normal conditions”, which is a lovely phrase until you remember how rarely conditions stay normal for long.
That is the mood music heading into 2026. Not doom, necessarily. Not even drama as a certainty. But a broad, nagging recognition that the neat centre of the probability distribution, the comforting baseline, is getting thinner. The tails are getting fatter. Surprises are becoming less surprising.
If you want a clean framework for this, the World Gold Council’s 2026 outlook is a good place to start. It acknowledges what market consensus currently implies: a world that holds together. Growth that doesn’t collapse. Inflation that continues to fade, but not to zero. Rate cuts that arrive, but not in a panic. A US dollar that is broadly stable. In that environment, gold may well remain rangebound, because the present price already reflects the prevailing macro story.
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And yet, the same outlook quietly admits the thing investors are not meant to say out loud. The macroeconomy rarely follows the path the consensus dictates. Policy rarely lands exactly as promised. Geopolitics rarely behaves. Even the definition of “risk” shifts beneath our feet. The report lays out scenarios rather than forecasts, not because it is being evasive, but because scenario thinking is simply more honest in an era like this.
In a mild slowing of growth paired with further rate cuts, gold can grind higher. In a deeper synchronised downturn, the kind that turns caution into fear, gold can do what it tends to do when the world starts asking hard questions about counterparty risk and financial stability. In a reflationary surprise, with stronger growth, a firmer dollar, and higher yields, gold can pull back meaningfully. None of this is radical. The radical part is that each path feels plausible, because uncertainty itself has become structural.
There is a reason for that, and it is not limited to central banks or hedge funds. It is filtering into ordinary households, and our own recent research in the UK shows it with uncomfortable clarity.
In GoldCore’s nationwide poll of 2,022 UK adults carried out in mid-November, nearly two-thirds said they worry about another financial crisis in the next 12 to 24 months. Three in five said they are actively looking for safer ways to protect their savings if the economy worsens. Majorities agreed that money in the bank is losing value, and that their savings’ value has already fallen in 2025. More than a third said they have considered investing in gold in 2026. Almost two-thirds believe gold will become more popular if uncertainty continues.
You can dismiss sentiment surveys as emotion, but that misses the point. The public does not need to express itself in the language of yield curves, liquidity conditions, and systemic fragility in order to be responding rationally to what it experiences. People can feel purchasing power eroding even when the nominal number in the account is unchanged. They can sense that the financial system requires a steady supply of confidence, and that confidence has become harder to manufacture. They can observe how frequently “highly unlikely” events now seem to occur.
Most importantly, people are beginning to recognise something that finance professionals sometimes forget in calm markets: many financial assets are, at bottom, promises. Bank deposits are liabilities of the banking system. Cash products are often portfolios of short-term paper designed to behave like cash. Bonds are contractual claims. Even much of modern “safety” is a chain of assumptions that holds together until it is tested.
This is precisely why gold’s role remains so stubbornly relevant. Gold is not a productive asset. It does not generate cashflow. It is not a growth engine. It is something else, and it has always been something else. It is an insurance asset. It is a monetary asset that does not rely on an issuer. It does not represent someone else’s obligation to pay. It sits outside the credit system in a way that almost nothing else does.
When the world is stable and trust is cheap, that can look like a disadvantage. Insurance always looks expensive right up until the moment it becomes obviously underpriced. That is why the case for gold rarely feels urgent in the middle of calm. Calm gives people permission to ignore the difference between substance and label.
Yet if 2025 has demonstrated anything, it is that “calm” is not a dependable base case. Gold has experienced a remarkable year, setting more than 50 all-time highs and delivering returns north of 60% by late November. The World Gold Council attributes this not to a single catalyst but to a broad convergence of forces: heightened geopolitical and economic uncertainty, a weaker US dollar, marginally lower rates, momentum, and a renewed drive for portfolio diversification. Central banks have continued to accumulate gold, and investors have been drawn back in. That is not the behaviour of a market obsessed with apocalypse. It is the behaviour of a market responding to a world where the cost of being wrong about risk has risen.
The most interesting part of the World Gold Council’s outlook, in my view, is not its range estimates but its underlying premise: we are in a period where outcomes can swing on political decisions, policy credibility, and sudden shifts in global sentiment. Under those conditions, investors and institutions do not look for the single best performer. They look for resilience. They look for diversification that is real rather than theoretical. They look for assets whose value does not depend on the smooth functioning of the very system they are trying to hedge.
This is also why the survey results should not be shrugged off. When 60% of people say they are actively looking for safer ways to protect savings, and 57% say money in the bank is losing value, that is not simply fear. It is adaptive behaviour. It is an acknowledgement that the traditional definition of “safe” no longer includes “preserves purchasing power”, and may not always include “preserves access”, depending on what kind of stress arrives.
None of this argues for rash decisions, or for exaggerated conclusions. 2026 may yet be a year of relative stability. It may even be, by recent standards, boring. But boring has become surprisingly difficult to sustain, and that is exactly why gold remains useful.
Because the real question is not, “Will gold go up next year?” The real question is, “How dependent is my financial wellbeing on everything continuing to work smoothly?”
If the answer is “very”, then gold is not a speculative bet. It is simply a way of reducing single-point risk. It is an acknowledgement that confidence, liquidity, and stability are not permanent conditions. They are maintained, and maintenance is getting more expensive.
In a world where shocks and surprises are increasingly the norm, gold’s capacity to provide diversification and downside protection remains as relevant as ever. That is not a slogan. It is just an old lesson that keeps returning, whether in 1720 or 2026, whenever the distance between labels and reality becomes too wide to ignore.
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