Gold prices are behaving like we’re on the brink of a financial crisis.
The safe haven asset hit $4,000 an ounce for the first time this week, recording its largest rally since the late 1970s.
Investors from retail to pension funds spent $9.3 billion on exchange traded funds linked to gold last month, according to Morningstar Direct. But the investor anxiety that often fuels a gold rush seems to be missing from the rest of the market.
Often when gold soars, stocks drop. For example, as the price of gold soared more than 600 percent from 1970 to 1979, when adjusted for inflation, the S&P 500 sank 11 percent. A similar pattern appeared during the Great Recession, when gold rose 37 percent from January 2008 to December 2009 while the S&P 500 nose-dived 23 percent.
By contrast, as gold was taking off this week, the S&P 500 recorded a high on Wednesday. Signs of crisis were also absent from bond markets and the U.S. dollar: Long-term U.S. bond yields have been relatively flat and the dollar’s value has been stable the past few months after a dip following President Trump’s tariffs announcement in April.
Joe Davis, the global chief economist of Vanguard, told DealBook the discrepancy between the stock market and gold is “almost unprecedented.”
So what’s going on? Davis said investors seem to be reading the economy in “dramatically different” ways.
The pessimists
For a big bet on gold to pay off, Davis said, more than one big thing would have to go very wrong: A.I., which has fueled the stock market’s growth, would prove a dud; the equity markets wouldn’t find other growth avenues to offset that A.I. dip; there would be a flight from U.S. Treasury assets, creating pressure on the dollar; and the Federal Reserve would abandon its fight against inflation, perhaps because of a loss of independence.
Holding gold can be expensive, as Warren Buffett once warned, because it doesn’t produce any income. (“If you own one ounce of gold for an eternity, you will still own one ounce at its end,” is how he put it.)
Some mainstream investors are betting on the asset nonetheless. Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, said at a conference on Tuesday that gold is safer than the U.S. dollar. He recommended that investors allocate up to 15 percent of their financial portfolios to gold (a significant change from the 60/40 stock and bond portfolio split traditional financial advisers provide).
Morgan Stanley recently suggested a 60/20/20 portfolio split, with bonds and gold equally weighted. “Gold is now the anti-fragile asset to own rather than Treasuries,” Mike Wilson, chief investment officer at the bank, said at the Reuters Global Markets Forum.
Ken Griffin, founder of Citadel Securities, summed up the pessimistic view at another conference on Monday: He said many gold buyers think, “I now view gold as a safe harbor asset in a way that the dollar used to be viewed.”
The optimists
Another investor perspective is that, despite economic risks like the ballooning debt of the U.S. and E.U., advances in A.I. will keep the economy hot, offsetting any threats.
“A lot of people, including a lot of big money, are confident in that more optimistic scenario,” said Ryan Chahrour, an economics professor at Cornell.
Also, Fear of Missing Out
“Financial markets are like fashion,” said Robin Brooks, an economist and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “It’s like bell-bottom jeans are back.”
Whether investors and money managers are primarily pessimistic, optimistic or just afraid of missing out, it’s hard to tell how much of the gold rally is about their sentiment at all: Central banks around the world have been stocking up on bullion for years to protect themselves against the possibility of Western sanctions and political uncertainty.
For now, economists and investors alike are in a game of wait and see. “Somebody’s going to be right eventually,” said Chahrour. “So either the financial markets are slow to adapt to the new circumstances, or the run-up in gold will be temporary.”
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
The White House said layoffs of federal workers have begun. After weeks of threats to cull the federal work force during the government shutdown, Russell T. Vought, the White House budget director, said on social media that the “RIFs have begun.” As of Friday, Republicans and Democrats did not appear to be closer to a resolution that could reopen the government. Unions representing federal workers pre-emptively challenged the legality of mass firings during a shutdown.
Trump threatened a “massive increase” in tariffs on Chinese imports. Stocks sank on Friday after Trump threatened to cancel a meeting with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, and to raise levies in retaliation for new export restrictions China put on its rare earth minerals this week.
The Trump administration moved forward with its bailout of Argentina. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Thursday that the U.S. had directly bought Argentine pesos and completed the terms of a $20 billion lifeline. The move came as a big relief for investors and money managers who have made big bets on the country, like BlackRock, but drew political blowback for the Trump administration.
María Corina Machado was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader, who built a movement to challenge the country’s authoritarian president, has been in hiding since last year. The Norwegian Nobel Committee praised “her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”
The founder with $0 of venture capital — and $1 billion in annual revenue
A.I. giants are spending billions to build and deploy their large language models, and a significant portion of that cash is going to companies that help train them by annotating data and providing human feedback.
Meta valued one of those services, Scale AI, at $29 billion when it made a deal to acquire a 49 percent stake in June, according to the start-up. Surge AI, a competitor, has kept a quieter profile. The company says it’s generating more than a billion dollars of annual revenue — before taking any outside capital.
DealBook’s Niko Gallogly talked with the founder of Surge AI, Edwin Chen, about the role humans play in building artificial intelligence and staying lean in Silicon Valley. The interview was edited and condensed for clarity.
You hire people to help train A.I. models. What are they doing on a typical day?
One of the newer paradigms for training A.I. is what we call reinforcement learning environments. Think of it like a Sims game, where you have a simulation of the real world.
Let’s say you are a doctor whom we’ve hired to help train A.I. models. In the Sims game, there might be a patient with a history of complications who needs a diagnosis. The A.I. “doctor” simulates all the tools needed to find a diagnosis, and then the real world doctor is basically measuring whether the A.I. model is right or not.
If it gets it right, there’s nothing for the A.I. to learn. If it gets it wrong, the real world doctor is going to teach the A.I. the right answer.
We are seeing start-ups like Surge driving high revenue with few employees, in part by outsourcing work to A.I. You have around 100 full-time employees, although you also rely on a large pool of independent contractors. Sam Altman predicted that we’ll soon see a company make $1 billion in revenue with just a founder. Do you believe that?
Yeah, absolutely. I just see how much the A.I. models are getting better and better, and we play a very critical role in that.
Some of the work that we are doing involves training an A.I. model to basically be a C.E.O., to be a lead software engineer who not just takes tasks and completes them but is correctly coming up with the right problems to solve. In a very real sense, it’s something that we are helping produce.
How will that affect venture capital? Will start-ups rely less on venture funding?
Even today, companies raise way more venture capital than they should. There’s a Silicon Valley mind-set where it becomes the default. People will see more and more companies like us, which can succeed over other V.C.-backed companies that have raised billions of dollars
Do you expect more companies will wait to raise at a later stage through private financing or debt?
I think it will be a much more serious consideration whether it’s even worth spending all this time raising at all.
A lot of founders say, “My entire job is fund-raising.” In what world does that make sense? Your job as a founder should be using your actual product, seeing if you actually like it, seeing if it’s good or bad, talking to your user to see how you could improve it.
Surge’s mission is to build A.G.I., or artificial general intelligence. How are you thinking about mitigating the risks?
We really care about making sure that A.I. is aligned with human values and making sure that A.I. is trained with the right objectives.
A.I. models today, they’re really smart. But we want to make sure they have street smarts. The way you get that is by training your models on the right objectives. You’re not spending all your time optimizing for leader boards and hacking benchmarks. Instead, you’re optimizing for the messiness of the real world.
Quiz: The sales of a showgirl
Taylor Swift’s 12th album of new material, “The Life of a Showgirl,” set a record this week for opening week sales numbers, surpassing the equivalent of 3.5 million copies sold in just five days, according to the tracking firm Luminate.
Ben Sisario, who reports on the music industry for The Times, wrote that the album’s huge commercial success “shows how physical media formats like CDs and vinyl LPs remain key to the success of top albums even now, when streaming accounts for about 82 percent of revenues from recorded music sales in the United States.”
About 1.2 million copies of Swift’s album were sold on vinyl. Physical copies were sold in at least 27 configurations that included vinyl, CDs, cassettes — and in one case, a sweater. The album release began with a “release party” with the premiere of a music video and other behind-the-scenes segments in movie theaters and drew $33 million in box office sales.
Which album previously held the record for opening week sales?
A. Whitney Houston’s “The Bodyguard” (1992)
B. ‘N Sync’s “No Strings Attached” (2000)
C. Adelle’s “25” (2015)
D. Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” (2011)
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Answer: C.
Niko Gallogly is a Times reporter, covering business for the DealBook newsletter.
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