(Zero Hedge)—Gold is climbing notably this morning, underscoring the potential for the precious metal to ratchet higher into year-end thanks to sustained buying from central banks and retail investors.
On the retail side, the total known ETF holdings of bullion are up this week, set to match the 12-week streak of gains posted through April 18, 2025.
That means the stockpile exceeds the peak touched just before the outbreak of the Iran war.
And central banks are backing up the truck as The Financial Times reports that China has spent a record sum importing more than 1,000 tonnes of gold this year as the central bank and local investors pour cash into bullion amid rising geopolitical tensions abroad and poor returns on local assets.
The world’s second-largest economy spent $158.8bn on gold in the first eight months of the year. That compared with spending of $96.5bn for all of 2025 on 886 tonnes of gold.
The jump comes after China reined in gold purchases last year during an intense rally that sent bullion prices soaring from about $2,625 a troy ounce at the start of 2025 to a peak of $5,595 in January.
There are signs that Chinese investors are increasing gold purchases as part of broader efforts to diversify their assets. Chinese holdings of US Treasuries fell to $618bn in July — the lowest level since August 2008.
“Both the central bank and private investors are diversifying their reserves and savings towards an asset with no counterparty risk, as part of a broader long-term wealth preservation strategy,” said Lisa Liu, managing director at Gold Mountains Asset Management, part of Zijin Mining Group — China’s largest gold miner.
But not everyone is embracing domestic demand for the barbarous relic…
India cut a key precious metals import tax relief policy overnight amid the country’s broader 2026 efforts to curb non-essential gold imports, ease pressure on foreign exchange reserves, and support the rupee amid high fuel costs and currency weakness.
The official stated reason is tax parity: to stop the tax treatment itself from making one import route (banks/nominated agencies) preferential over others (including channels such as the India International Bullion Exchange).
Simply put, the specific ‘key gold import tax relief’ being scrapped is the bank IGST exemption (framed politically as parity), but it is part of the same policy environment of measures taken earlier in 2026 explicitly aimed at moderating gold imports and protecting forex reserves:
In mid-May 2026 the government sharply raised effective customs duty on gold and silver from 6% to 15% (basic customs duty to 10% + Agriculture Infrastructure and Development Cess to 5%), with platinum rising similarly. Officials framed this as curbing non-essential/discretionary imports so foreign exchange could be prioritized for essentials (crude oil, fertilizers, industrial inputs, etc.) amid the West Asia crisis, elevated oil prices, and pressure on the rupee.
PM Modi publicly appealed to citizens to avoid gold purchases for a year.
Other steps included tighter rules on certain import schemes, delays in licenses/notifications, and related restrictions.
Higher import costs for gold reduce demand (or at least slow it), ease the current-account and FX drain, and thereby help limit further depreciation – the same logic that has driven gold-duty adjustments in past periods of external stress.
So China is backing up a very big truck, Retail is BTFDing in ETF-land, and India is still panicking over fuel costs (desperate to slow domestic demand for the only thing that hedges its currency’s collapse).
“This isn’t a short-term trade, it’s a multiyear repositioning of household and official assets. The scale and persistence of Chinese buying is now a core driver of global gold prices and we expect it to hold as long as uncertainty over growth and geopolitics remains,” said Liu.
As Bloomberg’s Garfield Reynolds notes, October in particular is looking like a sweet spot with rates traders sticking to bets that the Fed will delay any hikes until December, and with central bank appetite also showing little sign of abating, the level of demand out there has allowed bullion to show some resilience in the face of higher real yields and the resulting strength in the US dollar.
Gold is becoming an increasingly important diversifier for global investors at a time when government bonds no longer move inversely to stock markets.
Christopher Hamilton, Invesco’s head of client solutions for Asia Pacific ex-Japan, said gold prices had ceased to behave as they did during periods of rising real yields, which in the past caused gold prices to drop. “You’re in an environment where you want to own real assets,” he said.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
