Avanza is one of the largest banks in Sweden, and in their monthly blogg, they’re noticing a big movement where Swedes are selling their American funds and shares, to buy Swedish/European instead.
Avanza is one of the largest banks in Sweden, and in their monthly blogg, they’re noticing a big movement where Swedes are selling their American funds and shares, to buy Swedish/European instead.
I’ve been ridding Gold (of all things) since a bit after the 2008 Crash because after having been in Tech for the Tech crash and then right in the middle of Finance for the Finance crash - in Lehman Brothers, no less - and seen the “shove the problems under the carpet” non-solution for the latter, I became a firm believer than we were bound for a new Depression in the West.
Generally Gold, which has almost no industrial uses, works like a currency which does not rely on people trusting a country and its Economy like present day currencies do, so it tends to go up when countries are badly managed and their Economies start breaking - kind of an ultimate shelter for one’s savings when you can’t even trust the management of large countries and the value of their currencies.
Long story short, after a peak after the 2008 Crash, then a few years of a dip and a decade of slow increase in price, Gold has started taking off about 3 years ago and the speed of price increase has been going up every year (in 2024 it went up about 23%, in 2025 it went up 65%)
Given the political situation in mainly the US (but also in part Europe, as well as Europe’s continued excessive Economic entwining with the US not to mention all manner of laws in Europe that really just benefit US interests, especially around Intellectual Property, which partly tie us down to the success of those US companies), the many financial bubbles all over the place (most notably real-estate and stocks in global terms, plus AI mainly in the US) and we not having yet reached anywhere near the levels of economic pain seen in the 2008 Crash, I expect there’s still a lot to go in terms of Economic-pain and hence a lot to go in terms of Gold price increases until it reaches a peak. Certainly if the USD stops being a Reserve Currency, things are going to get crazy all around, making Gold even more attractive during that transition period.
That said the total value of all Gold mined ever is around $28 trillion (or it was 2 weeks ago, it’s more now), so less than merely the US public debt, so don’t really expect it to somehow replace the dollar or anything like it - it’s really just a Financial asset that goes up in times of political, economic and even societal crisis.
People will just call paper gold, gold futures. The last pillar holding up the US economy is Jerome Powell and if Trump gets rid of him, the US dollar will be worthless.
Paper gold would suffer from the exact same problem as all other fiat currencies - it would be entirely backed by trust on somebody or some institution and hence could collapse if that trust was abused, same as it seems to be happening with the USD as the US Administration abuses the trust placed in them which amongst other things backs the value of that currency.
The thing with actual physical Gold is that one can’t just print more of it and after millennia its stores are spread out all over the World thus there’s no one single major owner, so its pretty hard to manipulate (the closest to it, funny enough, is manipulating Gold Futures - i.e. paper - though that only seems to work for inducing short-term market movements that end up naturally corrected).
IMHO people would be better of spreading their savings across a basket of geographical locations and currencies than using paper gold.