Veteran Goldman strategist makes stunning $10,000 gold call

Gold has always been the asset investors run to when they stop believing in everything else.

It is the trade that pays off when central banks lose credibility, when currencies wobble, when geopolitics get loud, and when the rest of the stock market finally cracks.

For most of the past three years, that playbook worked beautifully. Sovereign buyers from Beijing to Warsaw to Ankara stacked bullion at a pace not seen in half a century. Retail piled in behind them. The metal blew through one all-time high after another, and the bears went quiet.

Then 2026 happened.

A US-Israeli war on Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz, sent energy prices vertical, and forced some of the same central banks that drove the rally to start unloading their gold to defend collapsing currencies.

The yellow metal has now given back almost all of its year-to-date gains, hovering near $4,534 an ounce on May 19, according to Fortune.

Now one of Wall Street’s most respected commodity voices is telling clients the pain is far from over. And the eventual payoff, if his call lands, will dwarf anything the gold market has ever produced.

Jeff Curies makes a stunning $10,000 gold call via an X thread

Photo by Bloomberg on Getty Images

Why this gold selloff is just getting started

The bear in question is Jeffrey Currie, the former global head of commodities research at Goldman Sachs (GS), who spent 27 years at the firm before leaving in 2023 and is now chief strategy officer of energy pathways at Carlyle Group (CG), according to Carlyle.

He is best known for calling the 2000s commodity supercycle and predicting oil’s run past $100 a barrel.

In a recent thread on X, the former Twitter, Currie wrote that he has been “short gold” since March despite describing himself as a “gold perma bull”. His thesis is mechanical, not philosophical.

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The Iran conflict and the prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz have driven energy import costs higher and pressured emerging-market currencies. To defend those currencies and pay for fuel, some of the world’s most prolific gold buyers have flipped into sellers.

Turkey is the cleanest example. Its central bank sold or swapped roughly 79 tons of gold in the first quarter alone, with “the largest sales from Turkey (60 tonnes) and Russia (16 tonnes) [offsetting] purchases elsewhere,” according to the World Gold Council.

“When the marginal central bank flips from structural buyer to forced seller to pay for energy, gold’s biggest bid disappears,” Currie wrote on X.

That dynamic, in his view, points to a deeper retracement. He sees gold sliding all the way toward $4,000, with a possible overshoot into the $3,750 range, before sovereign buyers, particularly China, step back in and restart the rally.

Related: Goldman Sachs has crucial message for gold investors in 2026

The bigger thesis behind the $10,000 gold target

Currie’s gold call sits inside a much bigger argument about how a decade of capital flows have left commodity markets dangerously under-invested. After running the numbers against his framework myself, the imbalance is more extreme than most equity investors realize.

The argument starts with where the money has gone. The Magnificent Seven plus Oracle (ORCL) are projected to spend roughly $820 billion on artificial intelligence capital expenditure in 2026 alone, which Currie called “the largest physical commodity bid ever assembled inside eight income statements,” according to Benzinga.

Meanwhile, the suppliers cannot keep up. The numbers Currie laid out paint a clear picture:

Information Technology and Communication Services make up roughly 43% of the S&P 500, while Energy and Materials together account for about 6%.Upstream oil and gas investment is down 35% from its 2015 peak.The world’s top 20 mining companies are spending 40% less than during the 2012 peak cycle, per Currie’s analysis.Central banks bought a net 244 tonnes of gold in Q1 2026, up 3% year-on-year.

Source: Currie’s analysis via Benzinga

Currie calls this transition the move from “HAGO” (Hard Assets, Global Operations) into “HALO” (Hard Assets, Local Operations), where physical commodities are repriced upward as supply struggles to meet AI-driven demand.

“The price will overshoot first. The capex will follow. Then the new supply,” Currie wrote in his X thread.

That sequence, in his framework, is what eventually pushes gold to $10,000. Once central banks stop fighting inflation, pivot back to easier policy, and resume buying physical metal, the same forced sellers of today flip back into structural bidders.

What this gold call means for your portfolio

None of this guarantees Currie is right. Plenty of veteran strategists have made bold price calls that aged poorly, and the path from $4,000 to $10,000 will almost certainly take years rather than quarters.

Iris Cibre, founder of Phoenix Consultancy in Istanbul, has noted that Turkey’s recent gold operations were primarily designed to support the lira during a specific war-driven liquidity crunch, not a verdict on gold’s long-term value, according to the Canadian Mining Report.

That distinction matters. Forced selling is not fundamental selling, and a 2025 survey found that 95% of central banks expected global gold holdings to rise over the next 12 months, according to the World Gold Council.

In my analysis, what makes Currie’s framework interesting is the structural argument underneath the headline number. Markets have systematically underfunded the physical world for a decade while flooding the digital one with capital.

If he is even directionally right, the next gold cycle is less about jewelry, inflation hedges, or fear trades. It is about repricing every ton of metal that an AI data center, an EV plant, or a defense supply chain ultimately needs, an argument that echoes Goldman’s own longer-term outlook for the rest of this decade.

For investors holding the SPDR Gold Shares (GLD) ETF, which was up 3.32% year-to-date as of last week, the short-term setup looks ugly. Currie himself is positioned for a deeper drawdown first. But the same trade he is shorting today is the one he expects to flip aggressively long once the energy shock starts hurting growth.

If you own gold, the next chapter of this story will probably be written by central banks, not by day traders. And central banks have very long memories.

Related: Jim Cramer has a blunt message on gold for investors

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