Our last piece walked through the Trump administration’s mining roundtable and the flurry of Department of War deals that followed. One question that piece left hanging: where does gold fit into all of this?
The short answer is that it doesn’t. Officially, anyway.
Gold is not on the USGS’s Critical Minerals List. The list, most recently updated on November 7, 2025 and expanded to 60 minerals, includes everything from antimony to zirconium. Copper, silver, potash, even metallurgical coal made the cut for the first time. Gold did not. Under the Energy Act of 2020, a critical mineral has to be essential to economic or national security, have a supply chain vulnerable to disruption, and serve an essential function in manufacturing. Gold fails that second test. The U.S. isn’t dependent on any adversary for it, and there’s no chokepoint China or anyone else can squeeze.
Gold is critical to national and economic security in that it is the ultimate backstop of the U.S.’s financial system as well as the U.S. dollar’s dominance as reserve currency of the world. But it is NOT part of a supply chain vulnerable to disruption (the U.S. has plenty of gold resources located throughout the country. Similarly, gold does NOT serve an essential function in manufacturing.
In this sense, gold isn’t a critical mineral in the technical sense that governs which companies get DoW equity stakes, Export-Import Bank loans, or Development Finance Corporation backing.
Having said that, gold’s significance to the Trump administration’s focus on national security is CLEARLY on display via Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recent comments.
Over the past several weeks, Bessent has raised U.S. gold reserves repeatedly, and on the surface, oddly. In a Fox News appearance, he confirmed Fort Knox’s holdings are “present and accounted for,” now worth more than $1 trillion at current market prices. He noted the U.S. is actively receiving more gold, including from Venezuela. Then, in a follow-up appearance, he added a strange coda: the gold “doesn’t matter” for the value of the dollar, because the U.S. operates on a fiat system now.
That combination, volunteering a trillion-dollar figure and then insisting it’s irrelevant, is the actual story. If it truly didn’t matter, there’d be no reason to bring it up twice in back-to-back interviews.
Here’s the more coherent read. Bessent isn’t making a monetary argument. He’s making a national security one, and using the dollar’s fiat status as cover for it.
Think about what he’s actually confirmed in these interviews. The gold is real, it’s growing, and the U.S. is actively adding to it, including shipments from Venezuela.
At the same time, adversary and rival governments are doing the same thing at a pace unseen in decades. Central banks globally have been buying roughly 1,000 metric tons of gold a year over the past four years, about double the pace of the prior decade. That buying is widely understood as central banks, particularly Russia and China, hedging against dollar-based sanctions and reserve freezes. When a country can’t trust that its dollar reserves are safe from being frozen or weaponized, it buys the one reserve asset no adversary can freeze, confiscate, or sanction out of existence.
The same anxiety shows up elsewhere in currency markets. Japan’s periodic yen interventions, buying or selling in size to defend the currency, are really about the same underlying concern from a different angle: a government reminding markets it still has tools to defend its own currency’s credibility even in a world where capital flows and carry trades can overwhelm it in days.
The fact the U.S. stepped in to aid Japan during a recent currency intervention further emphasizes this point: the U.S. is THE dominant power monetarily and is willing to aid allies in times of need.
In this sense, gold reserves and currency intervention are different instruments aimed at the same goal, signaling that a government isn’t powerless in the face of financial pressure it doesn’t fully control.
Seen that way, Bessent’s comments aren’t really about monetary policy. They’re a message to both allies and adversaries about American reserve resilience in a world where financial weapons, sanctions, asset freezes, SWIFT restrictions, have become as central to great power competition as tariffs or export controls.
So while gold doesn’t qualify as a critical mineral in the sense that the U.S. is dependent on other nations for it… it IS vital to the country’s financial national security in that it shows the U.S. can’t be starved of a reserve asset that holds its value no matter what happens to the financial system built on trust in the dollar.
In the very simplest of terms, anyone telling you gold doesn’t matter isn’t paying attention. Foreign central banks are buying 1,000 tons of it a year. And the U.S. is repeatedly reminding the world that it has the largest stockpile and is actively growing it.
In terms of profiting from this, we just published a Special Investment Report covering five investments you can use to profit from the next round of inflation.
The report is titled Survive the Inflationary Storm. It explains my top precious metals plays — their names, their ticker symbols, and the resources they own. These are high-octane positions that rallied 75%, 140%, 150%, 180%, 280%, and an incredible 574% in 2025. And I wouldn’t be surprised to see them repeat this performance in 2026.
Normally I’d charge $499 for this report as a standalone item, but in light of what is unfolding today, we are making just 100 copies available to the public.
To grab one of the last remaining copies…
Best Regards,
Graham Summers
Chief Market Strategist
Phoenix Capital Research
1 thought on “Is Gold a Critical Mineral? What Bessent’s Fort Knox Comments Are Really Telling Us”
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