Barely two weeks into 2026 with the mid-term elections only 294 days away – President Donald Trump has unleashed one of the most aggressive economic policy blitzes in modern history.
Fiscal cannon fire, monetary intervention and aggressive populist spending are tearing through the financial system – blowing open the credit markets, weakening the dollar, rerouting capital and jolting investors out of complacency.
For The Gold & Silver Club, the consequences are clear: this is rocket fuel for precious metals and a turning point that could accelerate the firm’s officially coined declaration that 2026 is The Year of Hard Assets.
The market response has been instant and unambiguous. Gold surged as much as 2.6% in a single session, hitting an unprecedented $4,625 an ounce. Silver matched that momentum with blistering velocity, climbing 7.2% to register a fresh all-time high at $85.73 an ounce.
Analysts at The Gold & Silver Club described the breakout as the early phase of a restructuring rather than a spike, with positioning and flows signalling that metals markets are no longer responding to policy – they are anticipating the next wave.
That expectation is rooted in Trump’s sweeping economic posture, which has transformed Washington from a hub of fiscal restraint into a centralised price-setting machine.
His administration has moved to impose a nationwide cap of 10% on credit-card interest rates, sent $2,000 tariff-funded rebate cheques directly into household budgets, ordered the Treasury to purchase $200 billion in mortgage bonds to force down long-term financing costs and publicly pressured the Federal Reserve to lower benchmark rates toward 1% in 2026. He has also weaponized energy policy by making $2-per-gallon gasoline a core campaign promise and shut institutional landlords out of the residential property market.
None of this has happened quietly. Each initiative independently stretches the limits of orthodox economics; collectively they amount to a monetary and fiscal experiment without precedent outside crisis conditions. More importantly, they share a common denominator: they pull capital away from paper assets, erode real yields and elevate the intrinsic value of tangible stores of wealth.
“This is the most explicitly commodity-bullish environment we have witnessed since the abandonment of Bretton Woods,” says Lars Hansen, Head of Research at The Gold & Silver Club. “Trump is intentionally weakening the gravitational pull of the dollar while simultaneously flooding the system with liquidity. That combination is historically unstoppable for Gold and Silver.”
Hansen emphasises that the metals market is only in the early innings. The Gold & Silver Club – which coined the phrase “2026: The Year of Hard Assets” – first projected Gold at $5,000 and Silver at $100 months before today’s breakout. Those levels, he argues, now represent the lower bound of a repricing anchored in structural policy rather than market sentiment.
“In a mid-term year, with the White House effectively subsidising households, suppressing borrowing costs and urging the central bank to ease, price ceilings stop mattering. Markets look for equilibrium – and with physical scarcity rising, that equilibrium may sit far higher than most traders imagine.”
With midterm politics weaponizing spending, subsidising energy and suppressing borrowing costs, traders remain drastically underweight precious metals.
As Hansen concludes: “History rewards early positioning, not hesitation. We coined the phrase Year of Hard Assets because it defines the macro reality traders must now confront. Under-allocation could prove to be the most expensive mistake of the decade.”
As 2026 gathers momentum, one conclusion is becoming increasingly unavoidable: the Year of Hard Assets has arrived – and those waiting for confirmation risk watching the next phase of wealth creation pass them by.
Phil Carr is co-founder and the Head of Trading at The Gold & Silver Club, an international Commodities Trading, Research and Data-Intelligence firm.