And So It Begins: Gold Is No Longer Cyclical. It’s Existential.

Written by Bryan Lutz, Editor at Dollarcollapse.com:

Gold’s recent “shockwave” collapse isn’t part of your regularly scheduled programming.

What you saw recently is not another pullback in the cycle. It’s a pulse from the heart of a dying system.

Gold is no longer cyclical. It’s existential.

Gold is no longer subject to the credit boom and bust, seasonal buying, tax saving ways of the system. The recent sudden drop in paper gold prices signals something much different, which will make gold price predictions, and profit taking harder than you might think. 

But first, research on market cycles goes back more than 150 years. For gold, all that research is flying out the window.

Here’s the story…

We’ll start with a fairly well-known investing chart. It is a chart that was able to predict much of the market’s movement until 1971, when Nixon took the gold standard.

The Ohio Farmer Who Could Predict the Financial Weather  

In 1873, an Ohio farmer named Samuel Benner lost everything in a financial panic. Instead of giving up, he spent the next several years studying a century of price data for iron, crops, and markets—determined to understand why prosperity always seemed to end in ruin.

His findings became Benner’s Prophecies of Future Ups and Downs in Prices (1875). It was one of the earliest attempts to chart the rhythm of economic cycles. Benner noticed that industrial prices peaked every 8–10 years, agricultural prices followed roughly 11-year swings, and major financial panics hit every 18–20 years. From those insights, he drew a hand-crafted chart mapping “years to buy” and “years to sell” for decades into the future—and remarkably, many of his predicted panics (1893, 1907, 1929) arrived almost on schedule.

Benner’s genius was seeing what modern economists often forget: markets are driven less by mathematics than by human behavior repeating in waves of greed and fear. His chart shows that cycles aren’t accidents. 

Interestingly enough, after publishing his book Benner passed away the same year the Federal Reserve was born (1913). 

As for gold, the price of gold in the United States was essentially fixed by law. So, there was very little volatility or even cyclical nature to the price of gold. From 1834 – 1933, under the U.S. gold standard, one troy ounce of gold was legally valued at $20.67 USD. Before that, under the Coinage Act of 1792, the price was $19.39 USD per ounce, later adjusted to $20.67 USD to align with Britain’s mint ratio.

So from Benner’s birth (1832) until long after his death (1913), the nominal price of gold barely moved at all.

And that means, there was no gold “market price” volatility. What fluctuated were commodity prices, credit conditions, and industrial demand.

Benner’s world made sense because money had meaning. Gold was the anchor. But once money itself became a floating abstraction, the cycle lost its center of gravity.

That’s when gold stopped being part of the system and started standing outside it.

Fiat Broke, and Re-Made the Cycle 

Benner’s 19th-century America was built on commodity money, a gold-standard currency system. Gold and silver constrained credit expansion, and prices of goods like pig, iron or corn rose and fell mainly with real economic production.

Because money supply was relatively fixed, the boom and bust cycle followed natural rhythms. For example:

Overproduction → Contraction → Recovery

Rinse and Repeat. 

This gave his 8-year(industrial), 11-year(agricultural), and 20-year(financial) cycles predictive power. That is, until this happened.

When President Nixon suspended dollar convertibility into gold on August 15, 1971, the entire pricing mechanism that Benner’s cycles relied on vanished.

Benner’s chart assumed a fixed-value monetary base—gold-backed dollars that allowed real commodity prices to oscillate around a stable reference point. However, once gold was removed from that system, the dollar itself began to fluctuate, and so did every commodity priced in dollars.

In short, the yardstick started stretching.

Here’s what that has looked like in gold terms from 1913 till now…

Without gold restraint, governments could expand credit and deficits indefinitely. A new pattern driven by policy cycles, not natural production cycles emerged. Commodities no longer followed Benner’s tidy 8, 11, and 20-year waves; they moved with interest-rate shocks, OPEC decisions, and Federal Reserve policy.

How 1971 Changed Gold’s Price

After 1971, the U.S. dollar became the world’s commodity instead of gold. It became the baseline for measuring all other currencies. The US dollar’s supply and demand dictated prices for everything else. Gold’s price began to expand and contract with the value of the dollar.

When the dollar weakened (1970s, 2000s), gold and raw materials prices surged.

When the dollar strengthened (1980s, 1990s, 2010s), gold and commodity prices slumped.

So, the old industrial rhythm morphed into a monetary rhythm tied to debt expansion and central-bank cycles.

Now, gold is about to leave the credit-driven cycle behind.

Here’s how it will work.

As a fiat system nears its end, gold’s behavior becomes parabolic, not cyclical — because the denominator (USD = currency) is collapsing.

You’re already witnessing the signals. This happens with every currency when it begins to collapse:

• Debt becomes unpayable without perpetual monetization (interest on Federal Debt is expanding faster than the US can pay it off, or even grow the economy).
• Central banks lose the ability to raise rates without imploding the system (ie. The Federal Reserve’s current situation).
• The public begins preferring hard assets to paper assets (an increasing amount of individuals rather than central banks are buying physical gold).

Every fiat currency ends this way. First it bends the cycle, then it breaks it. And finally, it breaks faith. We’ve seen this movie before — only this time, the screen is bigger.

When Paper Dies: Gold in Weimar Germany

After World War I, Germany’s money printer became its most powerful weapon. Their government, saddled with impossible war reparations, began creating marks by the billions to pay debts and pacify a hungry population. Like what the Federal Reserve is doing right now (M2 Supply increasing beyond its 2020 peak), the Reichsbank insisted it was “managing liquidity.” 

In reality, it was destroying the currency’s soul.

In 1919, one U.S. dollar was worth 12 German marks. Gold, fixed globally at about $20.67 per ounce. It traded at roughly 250 marks. But as the printing presses rolled, prices detached from reality. By late 1922, one ounce of gold cost 87,000 marks. A year later, it cost 87 trillion.

In just four years, the mark lost virtually all purchasing power, while gold, measured in paper, appeared to “rise” by 35 trillion percent. While gold’s intrinsic value stayed the same, it was the mark that died. Slowly at first, then all at once.

Daily volatility became madness. Prices doubled every 24 hours. Families spent paychecks before lunch, because by dinner the money was worthless. Those who held physical gold or foreign currency could still buy food, property, or passage abroad. Everyone else watched their savings evaporate into smoke.

Prices looked more like this.

As the US Dollar dies, gold price charts over the next decade, all around the world, will begin to look more like this.

By November 1923, a single gold coin could buy an entire block of Berlin real estate. Six months later, the Rentenmark replaced the worthless paper marks, restoring stability by backing new currency with land and production. But the social damage was done — a ruined middle class, moral exhaustion, and political radicalization that paved the way for catastrophe.

Weimar’s hyperinflation is not a “freak” event, or some historical anomaly. It is eventually what happens whenever a government breaks its link to hard money and tries to print its way out of reality. 

Gold isn’t trading inside the system anymore. It’s reacting to the system itself. The old patterns are gone. The credit cycles, seasonal rallies, and tidy price correlations that economists once charted have been replaced by something more raw and more human: a fight for confidence. 

Each violent swing in gold now measures the heartbeat of faith in fiat money — not the cost of ounces, but the cost of trust. When paper loses meaning, the market stops being a marketplace and becomes a mirror. That’s what we’re seeing now: gold reflecting the slow unravelling of the monetary story that began in 1971. The world of  the fiat-based US Dollar is dying, and a new way of being is emerging. It’s an existential shift we are not yet aware of.

Cheers…