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Gold and bitcoin have notched banner years, and this week both assets touched new all-time highs.
Gold breached $4,000 for the first time ever, while its digital counterpart moved above $126,000. They have climbed 51 percent and 31 percent in 2025, respectively.
Both are the two top-performing assets of the year, and as Charlie Bilello of Creative Planning noted, gold and bitcoin have never finished in the first- and second-best performing spots for any calendar year.
It’s no coincidence that just a week ago JPMorgan strategists crowned the arrival of the “debasement trade.”
Investors and institutions, they said, are increasingly seeking out hard assets that won’t depreciate in the face of rising government debt, inflation, geopolitical uncertainty, and “waning confidence in fiat currencies.”
As I’ve reported for Opening Bell Daily, investors have been seeking out ways to protect their purchasing power and outrun inflation.
Equity investors have been able to stave off inflation, but when you denominate the returns of the stock market in bitcoin or gold, rather than U.S. dollars, the returns are not as attractive.
As the charts illustrate, gold has appreciated more than 150 percent since 2020, while the U.S. dollar has lost more than 20 percent of its purchasing power.
Bitcoin, meanwhile, has gained roughly 1,000 percent in the same period.
Buying into gold and bitcoin is as much a bet on those assets maintaining their value as it is an expectation for the U.S. dollar to depreciate over time.
Indeed, structural forces around the world look poised to push more capital into hard assets and out of fiat currencies, pushing their prices in opposite directions.
“Investors are scared that governments around the world have created too much debt, therefore nation states and central banks have to debase their currency in order to avoid default,” investor Anthony Pompliano wrote in a note Monday.
“Holding dollars will be a losing strategy in this scenario.”
