In crafting their election-year narrative, President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats are attempting to save face by using a plethora of buzzwords to blame businesses for rising prices. Terms such as “price-gouging” and “shrinkflation” are used to publicly chastise any industry that dares to raise prices or reduce portion sizes, attributing such attempts solely to corporate greed. The problem for Biden is, the gold market is now a megaphone for his economic ineptness. 

Gold continues to close at record-setting prices. In the past six months alone, the metal is up almost 25% — now costing as much as $2,400 per ounce. For added context, at the start of 2021, the price of gold hovered around $2,000 per ounce, and at the start of 2024, the price was also approximately $2,000 per ounce. 

All of this is to illustrate that the current run-up in gold prices is very much a new phenomenon, occurring after three years of relatively stable prices. 

It appears that when the Biden administration promised that inflation would be “transitory,” it meant to a period of even higher inflation.