Four Experts Split on Gold, United on One Warning | This Week 'In Focus'

Gold spent the week whipsawing around $4,000, and four very different experts gave Kitco four very different reads on why, and what happens next. They don't agree on the path. They do agree it's about something bigger than gold.

In this week's This Week in Focus, Kitco's Jeremy Szafron pulls the threads together: technical analyst Gary Wagner on the two levels that now define the range and why he walked back his $6,000 call; veteran trader Clem Chambers on why he thinks the bottom isn't in and why "gold is for war"; former BlackRock portfolio manager Ed Dowd on the road to $10,000 gold and how a private-credit crisis could reach ordinary pensions; and constitutional scholar William Watkins on the 1933 gold call-in, the "shell game" behind the dollar, and why sound money was meant to make war expensive.

This episode was recorded July 23, 2026. Market levels move fast, check live prices at (https://www.kitco.com)

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Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Alright, gold has been whip tieing around $4,000 all week long, ripping higher one session, selling off hard the next, and it's not happening in a vacuum. Now, oil pushed back above $100, bond yields ran to the highest of the year, and the Fed meets next week with a rate hike suddenly back on the table. So what is gold actually telling us? Well, this week I put that to four very different people a chartist, a veteran trader, a former BlackRock money manager, and a constitutional scholar. And here's what makes this interesting. They do not agree. One is waiting to buy lower, one is bracing for a critic crisis, one says the dollar itself is the problem, but all four land on the same warning. This is about something much bigger than gold. So who's right? Stay with me. This is this week in focus. Welcome back. I'm Jeremy Staffrin. And a quick thank you to the comments, the emails, everyone who stopped me on Location of Florida, I've heard you in this weekly wrap-up show is here to stay. Now, here's the thread that ran through all four conversations that we had this week. Gold's wild swings around $4,000 aren't really a gold story. They're a dollar story, a debt story, and a credit story, depending on who you ask. And to make sense of this week, you have to start with the chart. So let's go back to net last week. That's when Kitko's very own technical analyst Gary Wagner of the GoldForecast.com watched gold break below $4,000 for the first time in months and told me his $6,000 year-end target had to change. Now, everything gold has done since the bounces up to the sharp drops have played out between the two lines he drew that day. Here's his read on where it goes from here.

SPEAKER_02 1:39

Well, if we count the beginning of the last strong leg of the rally, which was 39 to a top above 56. But even if you look at the body, it opened at 5400. This is the all-time record high. It comes down and makes a lower high. It then makes a lower low. Lower high, lower high, lower low, all the way down. This is a textbook example of a market under pressure. Now, I have a technical level that is now that it's broken what I assume could be, I always say potential support. Um, but the case is this market is highly, or the market participants are highly focused on interest rates and inflation. And the thing about inflation in this case is it has elicited a verbal response by the Fed. When you see inflation tick up and the and the Fed's still in a wait-and-see pattern or attitude, it will not affect prices as strongly as what we're seeing. But when you have the chairman coming out and talking about and strongly talking about recommending a rate hike, this is the first time that's been put back on the table in a long time. And that's what market participants correctly are reacting to. Changes in fundamental events or changes in the perception of forward monetary policy will always lead the market. The market reacts to what is said, and that's what we're seeing now. So when I said that there was potential support at this level, there was right in here. And when you look at this, this is the lowest low, you know, since quite some time. You've got to go back into 2025. If it continues to break, which obviously it has increased the probability of it with this strong down day, and more importantly, the fact that it's closing near the low, potential support comes in around 3920. And that's just the way we have to view the charts. If we have a model that's looking at a floor, but the fundamental um events or the focus by market participants are aligned to recalibrate because of new statements or new beliefs, such as a rate hike, you're going to see gold, silver react in those ways. All the precious metals are down today. You'll typically get silver having a larger uh percentage decline. But certainly, gold will, I believe, lead the way in terms of that reaction, but silver will move harder in whatever direction.

SPEAKER_03 4:46

So Gary's line in the sand on the downside is about 3920 on uh the way up. His pivot sits near 4200, right about where gold has been fighting all week long. But the call that got most attention here was the one that he had to take back. Because remember, this is a man who had gold on a path to $6,000.

SPEAKER_02 5:07

That call has to change. Remember, um I create models and look for certain activities based on past performance. But my mentor that really taught me more than anything else about technical analysis, following markets, and trying to forecast it is that think of a market technician as a worker on a ship and he's sitting at the the the um ender, the where the uh propellers come out, the back end of the boat, and he's looking at the waves to determine uh which way the boat uh will go, not is going, because the waves will determine the direction. But then he would put one huge caveat. But remember, Gary, only the captain knows when he's gonna turn the wheel. If you're just staring out of the ocean and and not looking at a map or anything, and you're just watching it, it occurs when action is taken. And that's the same in gold or any asset class to a degree in that it reacts to changes in fundamental policies and monetary policies.

SPEAKER_03 6:23

And that's what we're seeing. So only the captain knows when he turns the wheel. His point is that the chart follows policy, the Fed, not the headlines. And that takes us straight to the trader who saw this drop coming. Now we started the week with Clem Chambers, the veteran markets commentator, and he warned this audience that the sell-off had another leg down back when most people thought the worst was over. He was right, and and now he's telling us the level where he finally becomes a buyer again.

SPEAKER_00 6:51

Well, because it wasn't an ordinary rally, it was a bubble rally, and they always pull back a long way. Everybody believes the bubble until it bursts, and they keep believing it all the way back down. And that's the tragedy of bubbles, you know. Same with the dot-com, people made a fortune on the way up and put it all the all back, and maybe some more. So this is one of those bubbles, and I'm afraid that will be a very um uncomfortable idea to a lot of your viewers. But the good news is we're getting near to the bottom now, and I see 40 to 50 as being the bottom. So the the roof of the basement is 50 bucks. The the the floor of the basement is 40 bucks or thereabouts. So I'm expecting it to go to 50, probably go down a bit more, and then wobble about and and establish a bottom. And for gold, that's probably three and a half thousand dollars. It could be a little bit lower. So gold three and a half thousand as a place where it starts to get interesting because you know the speculators want to plunge at the bottom and then you know do whatever they want to do when they sell. Whereas investors they want to know really when to start dollar cost averaging again, right? And that's that's under $50 in silver. And you can, you know, buy some at $50, buy some at $45, buy some at 40, buy some at $39, buy some at 45, buy some at 50, but you know, you're you're moving into a position. And that moment where that starts is not that far away. It is sometime this year. And I think that that I will start itching under $50, and I will start thinking about picking up some bars at that point. But I'm not thinking about plunging and then expecting it to explode. I'm expecting it to go sideways for quite a long time, and I I really don't know when it's gonna rally again, although it could be a couple of years, yeah. Because if you look at these bubbles, there's normally a spike, like an echo of a boom a couple of years down the line. So I believe that will probably come. And and what happens really long term, obviously it's gonna go up a long way because we're about to go into a seriously inflationary period. And the gold, you know, I I I think you're brave if you're buying it now, but you're not brave if you're buying it at um three and a half thousand, and you'll be, you know, you'll be good if you're buying it at three thousand, and I think you'll be lucky to get it that low. I I should think three and a half thousand, three, three, and you'll gain you'll see a long-term sideways move. It might have some dips in it, it might have some rallies, and you know, if you're DCAing, you you buy two um chunks when it dips. So, you know, I th I think we're back into stacking mode um very soon. And of course, most people want to know where the bottom is, and and that's where I believe it is, and it's not far away. You know, at um $110 on silver a few weeks ago, and it started to fall. I mean, the bottom was a long way away, or where we are now was a long, long way, let alone where we're gonna end up. So, you know, that that kind of period is over. Right. We're now close to a bottom, and we're now close to an area where I personally would be looking to start picking up silver and gold and platinum and palladium.

SPEAKER_03 10:20

So Chambers wants lower before he buys, and and when he says stacking, he just means buying gradually rather than all at once. And and here's the bigger, more contrarian idea why gold fell in the first place. He says it isn't the Fed at all, it's it's war.

SPEAKER_00 10:34

So you have a situation where um President Xi in China has gone on the record to say he's gonna get Taiwan back. Okay, you you can go back and you can hear lots of people talk about that over the last few years. And all the people I know in Europe that are connected to military things were saying that that was next year, around April and May. Yeah, and everybody was panicking about that, and military people were saying if you've got any technology for us, you better have it ready for you know the middle of 2007, otherwise we're not interested because of that. Yeah, so and the the the the impact of China trying to take Taiwan would be completely catastrophic. Yeah, and that was on the cards, and people thought that was coming. Now, at the beginning of this year, and you could this is all documented, so you can dig it out. Xi and the PLA fell out with each other. So you're not gonna have you know World War III if you haven't got your army on side. So it was postponed, or maybe cancelled, and or maybe somebody convinced the leadership that they could do nothing and win. And doing nothing and win is a brilliant strategy because boy, is America gonna have to do a lot to not lose. And if they if they're not going into Taiwan, the need of vast gold reserves suddenly you know evaporates or certainly gets less pressing because you gold goes up before a war, gold is for war, because it's a currency during war. So during a war, you have to sell your gold, like Russia's doing, and I'm sure Iran is doing, and that puts a downward pressure on gold. Now, once the war is over, up gold goes because the wars have created inflationary pressures that have been suppressed by things like like um price control, and gold goes through the roof because people aren't selling it anymore, and people want to get their hands on it to stop their fear getting devalued. Because in a war, the fear are is just tokens that are gonna completely you know collapse in value after the war is over and and markets free up for prices, and you know that's that that's what happened in World War II, blah blah blah. So on the lead up to a war, everybody's buying gold because they're gonna need to have golden bullets, because that's what they're gonna have to buy stuff with. So anybody within in any reach or anybody at all, any government at all needs to lay in gold. Now, the moment that eventuality starts to disappear, the optionality starts to become more vague, is not so not such not so expensive, then gold falls. And that's what I believe we saw back in the beginning of the year. China went, right, we're not we're not gonna invade Taiwan next year in in May, and but that was it. That was the that was the end of that vertical. Because the if they had done that, or even if people thought they were gonna do it, even if there's a percentage possibility of them doing it, massive impact. I mean, what happens to the Nasdaq if there's no Taiwan? All the chips come out of there, and all the chips come out of China. What happens when America is at loggerheads with China over Taiwan and you know all those chip plants in Taiwan are blown up? Why do you think Intel's 100 well was $120 a share from $20 a share? When I was saying, oh, you know, Intel's going to go through the roof because of new American foreign policy, it was $20. $120. And yes, I did do quite well out of that. So if you put all those pieces together, the onshoring of American industry, what why do you think they're doing that when they can buy it all cheap from China? Well, China's an adversary now. So you've got to onshore all your production, you've got to onshore all your rare earth. Look what's happened to rare earth, look what's happened to all those stocks, mountain pass, um, you know, people like that. So um neo-performance um minerals, they've all gone through the roof because China has a stranglehold over strategic and critical minerals. And you've if they're not your friend, if they're an adversary, you've got to onshore it. You've got to onshore all your factories, you've got to onshore all your shipbuilding, you've got to onshore everything. Well, boy, that's a big ask. And you know, when China isn't gonna kick off an invasion of Taiwan, which would be almost undescribably terrible, and says, Oh, we're not doing that, or people work out they're not gonna do it, maybe it's the year after, or maybe probably not even the year after that, or maybe they're not doing it at all. Then, well, gold is has just lost a very, very powerful use case.

SPEAKER_03 15:22

So, gold as a war currency, that's a lens you don't hear very often. And one more from Clem here. Uh, and this one is a warning for anyone who actually holds the physical metal because the price on your screen is not always the price you can get.

SPEAKER_00 15:34

Well, I mean, it was down um 80% of the screen price, 70% of the screen price. Nobody wanted to buy it at the top of the market, because there's a chain of you bringing in a coin to a coin dealer and it going down the chain to some guy that's going to melt it down and turn it into a bar. And when that chain's blocked, no one can buy it because they can't get it into the chain. And they're not buying your silver at $120 an ounce if it might fall to $80 overnight, in fact, like it did. Yeah, because they'd they give you $120 and then three weeks later they're sitting on a fat loss. So they just say no, the the pipeline is choked. So what I told my people when it was getting up to the highs on on my YouTube channel, Clem Jambers Alpha, was get your exit sorted. You don't have to sell, but make sure you can you know, identify the exit, like in the aeroplane. They say the exit may be behind you. Yeah, you have to know where you're gonna sell. Yeah, because I mean, even in the markets, in a crash, you go to sell and all the blooming brokers have crashed because everyone's trying to sell. So you have to, if you are going to invest, always know how you're gonna sell.

SPEAKER_03 16:48

So sort out your exit before you ever buy. Simple, and a lot of people learn it the hard way. Uh Chambers is planning patience. My next guess is planning for a crisis. Now, Tuesday brought us to Ed Doubt, a former BlackRock portfolio manager who now runs Global Macro at Finance Technologies. And he would be cautious on gold right here, but he still sees it reaching about $10,000 on the other side of the crisis. He believes that has already started. I asked him to walk us through exactly how gold actually gets there.

SPEAKER_01 17:19

Well, so gold had a you know a tremendous run up going up into January of this year. And in many ways, it maybe kind of um discounted the war was coming, some some geopolitical events and had a parabolic move, uh, which I don't believe is the end. Uh, then it started to consolidate, and then the war started and gold uh started to go down, and that's because a lot of the countries in that were affected needed a liquidity right away and they sold what they could, which was some gold. Turkey uh uh sold many tons of gold. So that that was a short-term pressure on gold. If there's a risk-off trade, uh generally speaking, uh gold may get hit some more, but that's you know, you want to buy that uh that sell-off because we know what's gonna happen. We know that the Fed and the governments of the world are gonna print and spend and that will reinflate, and then gold should do fine after that.

SPEAKER_03 18:16

So for Dowd, uh the dip is the opportunity because he is convinced the policy response is coming. But here's the part that reaches ordinary savers. How a credit problem most people will never see could end up sitting inside of their retirement account.

SPEAKER_01 18:31

The little trick that happened, and it didn't it wasn't intentional, it just happened. You know, look, the product credit industry started uh in earnest after the great financial crisis. And like all niche uh financial instruments, it it met a need and it and it worked. The problem is the fees were fat and big because it became eventually the new junk bond market. People don't understand this, but junk bonds are publicly traded. Uh there's a lot more transparency uh going on, and you can you get a public quote, so you know what's going on in the market. Uh the junk bond market lost share to the private credit market because the issuers uh were traditionally uh even uh riskier, and they they get confidentiality, no mark-to-market, and that's all good and fine when the flows are going. It kind of supports the whole thing. But the flows have paused, and now you're seeing uh the Wall Street alchemists, and I hate the word alchemy because that triggers me. Uh, when I was at BlackRock, uh BlackRock had a small CDO operation, not nothing as big as the other big guys, but uh the head of that uh that that that division notoriously said, I turned SHIT into gold, which is alchemy. That that didn't end up well. So now the the the latest thing we're seeing is they're trying to wrap up uh the these current private credit funds into loans to sell to insurance companies with an insurance wrapper. And that that smells awful lot like the great financial crisis, and eventually it doesn't end well. And so the the people the the the private credit market is basically resides in insurance balance sheets, asset manager balance sheets, uh high net worth balance sheets, and pension and endowment balance sheets. And when that goes south, uh that's that's where the losses are gonna be, and those people are gonna get all uh, you know, well, we don't know yet. We have the this whole space is gonna be stress tested. So we don't know what the losses are gonna be, but I suspect they'll be higher than what they're projecting.

SPEAKER_03 20:27

So packaged up, wrapped, and sold on to insurers and pension funds. And in his words, it smells an awful lot like 2008. Now, three guests, three very different timelines. And my last one this week isn't a market voiced at all. On Wednesday, I did something a little bit different here. I brought in a constitutional scholar, William Watkins, or Bill Watkins of the Independent Institute, uh, with the federal debt near $40 trillion, according to the Treasury. He argues that the whole trajectory reflects a country that drifted from the limits it once set for itself. He does not stop at his conclusion. Start with uh his read on the day Washington called in America's gold.

SPEAKER_04 21:08

No, it's absolutely not constitutional. Uh a true reading of that document, you can find no power where government can take uh the people's money in that regard. Sure, government can pose uh in uh impost excise taxes with the uh income tax amendment. You can tax incomes, uh, but it you have to stretch that document so far uh to be able to take the people's gold uh from them. Uh there is no constitutional standing for that, especially again, it's clear that the framers, uh the power to coin money, gold and silver. Uh this was getting rid of fiat money, which had so plagued uh the states and the Continental Congress uh and the war for independence. They saw the damage that it could do, how it robs um essentially creditors um of their investments, the value of items they've sold, and they were ready to put a stop to it.

SPEAKER_03 22:11

So, in his reading, that was never constitutional, but a sharper point is about what the dollar actually rests on today.

SPEAKER_04 22:19

Well, I think if you're holding dollars, you have to recognize that there's a great uncertainty that uh that paper money is really only tied uh to the coercive power of the federal government, uh, to the extent it can cause other uh industries, other people uh to hand over things of value. There is nothing tangible backing it like gold or silver. Um it's a bit of a shell game that we just smile and keep playing, but uh it is but a game. There's nothing of real value behind it.

SPEAKER_03 22:54

So nothing of real value behind it. His words, and here's the idea from Watkins that stuck with me the most that hard money was meant to make war itself harder to wage.

SPEAKER_04 23:04

Especially if you look in uh Jefferson's uh writings and his economic thought. Uh the idea is that hard money uh would force government. For example, if government wanted to get involved in a foreign adventure or a foreign war, you would have to pay for that uh rather than just printing uh dollars inflating the currency. To pay for it, you would have to tax the people. They would feel that bite immediately uh as the tax gatherer uh showed up at their door wanting more of their resources. Therefore, the people would use the franchise to limit government, to pull government back from, say, the foreign adventure there. Uh we've lost that uh now with uh paper money and inflation and the way where uh Federal Reserve conducts matters.

SPEAKER_03 23:58

A government that has to tax to fund a war has to convince you first, print the money instead, and that check quietly disappears. So put the four of them in a room. They do not offer one forecast. Wagner sees a chart under pressure, caught between clearly defined support and resistance. You got Chambers who wants kind of a lower entry and thinks that the medals could drift sideways here for quite a while. Dowd expects a credit event first and the big gold move only after the government responds. And Watkins isn't forecasting prices at all. He is questioning the monetary structure underneath of them. What connects them isn't really a single gold target. It's it's one question. What happens to gold when confidence in the markets and credit and government and debt or the currency itself begins to weaken? That's the thread this week. Gold's violent move around $4,000 is the visible part. And the disagreement is over on what's happening underneath it. It's what comes next. Now, that's this week in focus. The full conversations, again, are all linked below. Obviously, they go a lot deeper than these clips can do for you. Here's my question for you in the comments of the four. Whose macro version convinces you? Is it the charterist, the trader, the macro manager, or the scholar? Tell me below. And remember, subscribe. We do this every week. I'm Jeremy Stafford for all of us here at Kitco News. Thanks for watching.