The dashed line on the chart is at $2,860 (Jan 1980 in March 2026 USD). Every main rise in gold prices between 1980 and 2025 stayed below that level.
– Sep 2011 (post-GFC peak): $2,583 real => 10% below
– Aug 2020 (pandemic peak): $2,507 real => 12% below
– Oct 2024: $2,815 real => only 1.6% below, closest
– Feb 2025: $2,991 real => first month strictly above
– Mar 2026 (latest): $4,856 real => 70% above the 1980 line
The breach is sustained: 14 consecutive months above the 1980 line as of March 2026, no retracement.
One important detail : the famous $850 spike on January 21, 1980 was an intraday move during the Hunt brothers / Iran crisis period, so it’s a different benchmark. Adjusted for inflation, that spike equals about $3,599 in March 2026 dollars. Monthly averages moved above that level in September 2025. The chart uses monthly averages the whole way through to keep the comparison consistent across decades.
Sources: World Bank Pink Sheet (LBMA London PM Fix), BLS CPI-U via FRED. Built in tools Python/matplotlib.
Curious what people think: was Jan 1980 a unique macro event (Hunt corner + Iran hostage crisis + pre-Volcker inflation peak), or do hard assets just take much longer than equities to recover inflation-adjusted highs?
jekewa on
If history repeats, that’s likely to happen again. Looks like a dozen year(s) long dips after a few peaks, with that long drought after the 1980s. There will probably be a staggered drop to a plateau again soon.
People banking on anything maintaining or gaining value when it’s at its all-time highs are gambling as much as or more than the are investing.
righthandofdog on
I’m not an economist, but gold is a commodity with significant industristrial use. It’s also used as a signifier of wealth, which should increase sales in good times and considered a hedge against inflation by enough people to make it quite volatile, meaning far more likely to make (or lose) money for active investors.
Since leaving the gold standard, it sucks as an ASSET one might hold which would only change if a nations banking system collapses entirely or if you want to hide your assets from the government.
lo_fi_ho on
Like Patrick Boyle said, gold is the 4000 year old OG meme stock
femalediesinendgame on
And some ignorant conservative investors still think it’s a good investment.
Gold is a fools game. Literally a textbook case of the greater fool theory.
No real value of any sort whatsoever, let alone “intrinsic”, is attached to it, and the little real world use it has could never drive such valuations, it’s merely 10-15% or so of global demand, with the rest being jewelry and investments.
It produces nothing, does nothing, and its supply is (to an extent) manipulated to keep it low. It trades on pure psychology of fear and market sentiment, is volatile as hell, and boomers will still invest in it (of course without any real arguments, at all, ever) while calling something like Bitcoin a scam. Then 20 years later and down 50% they’ll still call it a good investment. The jokes write themselves.
Humanity is way past gold, it’s a relic of an age when we had nothing better to do its job. I think we will realize eventually.
Edit:
I’m not trying to compare Bitcoin to gold, neither am I trying to say that one or the other is better, I’m just trying to outline the hypocrisy of said investors who understand neither, yet continue to blindly prefer one over the other.
JeromesNiece on
There are a surprising number of people I see on twitter who think that this chart should be a straight line: they think that gold price appreciation is synonymous with inflation. And that any deviation from gold prices is evidence that inflation is being measured incorrectly. Which is obviously absurd, because it is obvious that the price of most things has not increased by 46% in the past year (as gold has).
SlowCrates on
Hide your catalytic converters.
hacksoncode on
Also works reasonably well as a graph of financial instability… which is kind of the point, I think.
elementofpee on
Classic cup and handle. Just took nearly half a century to play out.
ChocolateBunny on
I was under the impression that the run up in gold started after the Ukraine war because western economies clamped down hard on Russian oligarchs. It indicated to foreign investors, that relying on US dollars and US treasuries as safe assets is not a safe assumption if your country could come at odds with western governments. I think the main example of this was large Chinese investors, were hedging against the Chinese government invading Taiwan and thus resulting in their US assets being seized.
10 Comments
Gold’s inflation-adjusted monthly average finally moved back above its January 1980 peak in February 2025 — 45 years and 1 month later.
Animated version + downloadable CSV: [https://eco3min.fr/en/gold-real-price-1980-peak-broken/](https://eco3min.fr/en/gold-real-price-1980-peak-broken/)
The dashed line on the chart is at $2,860 (Jan 1980 in March 2026 USD). Every main rise in gold prices between 1980 and 2025 stayed below that level.
– Sep 2011 (post-GFC peak): $2,583 real => 10% below
– Aug 2020 (pandemic peak): $2,507 real => 12% below
– Oct 2024: $2,815 real => only 1.6% below, closest
– Feb 2025: $2,991 real => first month strictly above
– Mar 2026 (latest): $4,856 real => 70% above the 1980 line
The breach is sustained: 14 consecutive months above the 1980 line as of March 2026, no retracement.
One important detail : the famous $850 spike on January 21, 1980 was an intraday move during the Hunt brothers / Iran crisis period, so it’s a different benchmark. Adjusted for inflation, that spike equals about $3,599 in March 2026 dollars. Monthly averages moved above that level in September 2025. The chart uses monthly averages the whole way through to keep the comparison consistent across decades.
Sources: World Bank Pink Sheet (LBMA London PM Fix), BLS CPI-U via FRED. Built in tools Python/matplotlib.
Curious what people think: was Jan 1980 a unique macro event (Hunt corner + Iran hostage crisis + pre-Volcker inflation peak), or do hard assets just take much longer than equities to recover inflation-adjusted highs?
If history repeats, that’s likely to happen again. Looks like a dozen year(s) long dips after a few peaks, with that long drought after the 1980s. There will probably be a staggered drop to a plateau again soon.
People banking on anything maintaining or gaining value when it’s at its all-time highs are gambling as much as or more than the are investing.
I’m not an economist, but gold is a commodity with significant industristrial use. It’s also used as a signifier of wealth, which should increase sales in good times and considered a hedge against inflation by enough people to make it quite volatile, meaning far more likely to make (or lose) money for active investors.
Since leaving the gold standard, it sucks as an ASSET one might hold which would only change if a nations banking system collapses entirely or if you want to hide your assets from the government.
Like Patrick Boyle said, gold is the 4000 year old OG meme stock
And some ignorant conservative investors still think it’s a good investment.
Gold is a fools game. Literally a textbook case of the greater fool theory.
No real value of any sort whatsoever, let alone “intrinsic”, is attached to it, and the little real world use it has could never drive such valuations, it’s merely 10-15% or so of global demand, with the rest being jewelry and investments.
It produces nothing, does nothing, and its supply is (to an extent) manipulated to keep it low. It trades on pure psychology of fear and market sentiment, is volatile as hell, and boomers will still invest in it (of course without any real arguments, at all, ever) while calling something like Bitcoin a scam. Then 20 years later and down 50% they’ll still call it a good investment. The jokes write themselves.
Humanity is way past gold, it’s a relic of an age when we had nothing better to do its job. I think we will realize eventually.
Edit:
I’m not trying to compare Bitcoin to gold, neither am I trying to say that one or the other is better, I’m just trying to outline the hypocrisy of said investors who understand neither, yet continue to blindly prefer one over the other.
There are a surprising number of people I see on twitter who think that this chart should be a straight line: they think that gold price appreciation is synonymous with inflation. And that any deviation from gold prices is evidence that inflation is being measured incorrectly. Which is obviously absurd, because it is obvious that the price of most things has not increased by 46% in the past year (as gold has).
Hide your catalytic converters.
Also works reasonably well as a graph of financial instability… which is kind of the point, I think.
Classic cup and handle. Just took nearly half a century to play out.
I was under the impression that the run up in gold started after the Ukraine war because western economies clamped down hard on Russian oligarchs. It indicated to foreign investors, that relying on US dollars and US treasuries as safe assets is not a safe assumption if your country could come at odds with western governments. I think the main example of this was large Chinese investors, were hedging against the Chinese government invading Taiwan and thus resulting in their US assets being seized.