Gold Is Now a National Security Asset
Graham Summers told Michelle Makori on The Real Story that the United States is already running a wartime economy, and gold is no longer a side bet. The tell, he said, was the Defense Production Act. In March 2025 the president signed Executive Order 14241, immediate measures to increase American mineral production. In the original draft he named gold a critical mineral.
“The president actually verbatim in that executive order deemed gold a critical mineral. And what that means is that gold is deemed critical to the matters of national security.”
Gold did not make the final critical mineral list because the United States has domestic supply. Summers still reads the draft as the admission. Everybody spent decades treating gold as an inflation hedge or a conspiracy asset. The game changed in 2010, the same year central banks started buying a thousand tons a year.
“The game we’re playing now is very different from it was 10 years ago. And gold’s now in the mix, as you astutely pointed out, in key ways. And I think people need to be aware of that that that’s not going to revert.”
He pointed at sanctions. Iran used gold to trade around the dollar channels. Washington’s answer was to treat that as a reason to find the traders and cut them out of SWIFT. Gold, in that telling, is money again, and it has been weaponized.
“War is the art of deception. But what he’s also saying is that gold’s essentially money. So, it’s actually gold’s now been weaponized… Gold is now front and center in terms of national security in ways it hasn’t been in decades.”
The dollar’s purchasing power, he said, has not been durable for fifty years. A reassociation of the dollar to gold is the one two punch he would not rule out. Revaluing official holdings from the statutory $42 an ounce to market would unlock a trillion or more on the balance sheet. Covert accumulation is possible through the Exchange Stabilization Fund or a sovereign wealth fund kept off the books. He would not be surprised.
Silver sits in the same wartime frame. Makori asked whether the metal is so vital to the military industrial complex that someone has an interest in holding the price down. Summers listed the uses: torpedoes, missiles, satellites, the grid, data centers, AI. He has plenty of domestic silver, he noted, and he does not claim to know if the futures market is the tool. He does know the United States is sourcing it, and he compared any suppression talk to the open verbal intervention that happens in oil every time a deal with Iran is floated.
“We’ve long understood that silver is vital not just to the electric grid, to data centers, to AI, but also the defense industry.”
The larger structure is the everything bubble. After 2008 the Fed cornered Treasuries, zeroed the short end, and bought the long end. That manipulated the risk profile of every other asset. Stocks, real estate, commodities all sit on top of a Treasury bubble that cannot be normalized without breaking the system. The stock market itself is now national security, he said, because the AI buildout is the war with China, and Bessent has already said that if China wins the AI arms race nothing else matters. Forty five percent of household net worth is in equities. Administrations intervene when that crashes.
In a wartime economy, Summers told her, things get done whether they make sense or not. The investor’s job is not to hunt black swans. It is to ride the bull market as long as it runs and get to the exit before the wheels come off. His barbell is AI infrastructure bottlenecks on one side and critical minerals on the other. He owns gold. He owns a scandium project the Department of War fast tracked, with a long contract to Lockheed. Some of the mineral legislation Trump signed started under Biden. The momentum is bipartisan because the adversary is China, and the minerals, including gold and silver, are the ammunition.
“Anything that the Trump administration is taking an interest in is going to be repriced.”
That is the line for the hard asset holder. Gold was named in a wartime executive order. Silver is in the weapons. The Treasury bubble is the everything bubble. The repricing, in Summers’ map, is not a trade. It is policy.
