| Welp! It happened: Gold hit a new record of $4,000 an ounce. At the rate it’s climbing, we could melt down all that Oval Office decor and pay off the US debt by the year’s end! I’m kidding, of course. Beneath all the excitement is a distinct unease. Stocks — which normally zig while gold zags — are surging as well, which might have more to do with the AI hype cycle than anything else. The dollar, meanwhile, is slightly down and economists — hi, Paul Krugman — are trying to figure out how long America’s Gilded Age 2.0 will last. Is now a good time to hit up your local Costco to buy some bullion? While Allison Schrager advises against such mortal temptations, the annual return on a one-ounce hunk of gold is hard to pass up. They’re selling like hot cakes (or should I say, hot dogs) at the members-only warehouse and there’s now a limit on how many purchases can be made in a 24-hour period. Citadel’s Ken Griffin sees the mania as a warning about the dollar’s dwindling influence — something that’s on everyone’s mind lately: Jonathan Levin says Griffin makes a good point about the risk of consumer price spikes, but he’s wrong about US cash becoming irrelevant in the face of gold’s gains. “The buck is still the undisputed champion of global currencies,” Jonathan writes. Daniel Moss agrees, pointing to a new Bank for International Settlements survey as proof. According to the data, the dollar is still present in nearly nine out of every 10 currency trades. “Despite the doomsaying that was pervasive after the White House imposed sweeping tariffs, the greenback is as entrenched in the cogs of global finance as ever. If anything, its use is more pervasive,” he writes. And unlike gold, which is used primarily for jewelry, dental fillings and food dust, the dollar still has plenty of utility. As Paul J. Davies writes, “it’s still not uncommon for a domestic builder or plumber to ask for payment in cash.” Down the road, though, Paul predicts that babysitters and baristas might ask to be paid in Tether (or any other cryptocurrency that’s pegged to the dollar) because stablecoins allow for “everyday, low-level tax dodging,” Paul writes. I guess stablecoins would render the phrase “under-the-table” rather useless, but no matter. The dollar is still a main character in the global financial system, even if other assets like gold and crypto shine a bit brighter. I’ve seen this chart approximately 50 times on my various social timelines today: It comes from this Bloomberg News story about how OpenAI and Nvidia are “artificially propping up” the $1 trillion AI market with “a web of circular deals.” Scary stuff!! But maybe not as scary as you think. While it’s true that Big Tech is getting uncomfortably close to dot-com bubble territory, Justin Fox says the spending boom itself is not out of the ordinary: After three days of chart-making (a small sample of which he shares in his column), Justin’s general sense is that AI “has yet to become quite the force that tech and telecom were in the late 1990s. Yes it is driving a large share of current US economic growth, and if it were to end suddenly there would be unpleasant consequences, but at this point there’s nothing especially alarming,” he writes. What is alarming is that AI demand is extending coal’s lifeline, thanks to President Trump’s $625 million investment to “expand and reinvigorate” the industry. But no matter how much the administration touts the merits of coal, Richard Abbey and John Authers say data centers need all the power they can get, and renewables — even the Chinese solar panels that David Fickling opined about today — are part of that equation. “Regardless of this administration’s energy priorities, demand has to be met in a timely and cost-effective manner. In the absence of sustained generation for energy-guzzling data centers, it is preposterous to delay other sources of energy merely for ideological differences,” they write. | 
