Why Gold Could Hit $7,000 Next, According to Peter Schiff

Gold is breaking out to new highs. Silver is going hyperbolic. And Peter Schiff is back in the spotlight — not just to say “I told you so,” but to argue that the moves in precious metals are only just getting started.

“I think gold, now that it's surpassed $5,000 again, I think $6,000 is easily in the cards for 2026,” Schiff told Coinage in a new interview. “But gold could go up a lot more than 20%. It can go to $7,000 this year. It can go higher."

To Schiff, it’s not that gold is doing anything remarkable. It’s that the collapse in confidence behind the U.S. dollar and a once-in-a-generation shift is just beginning.

“Gold is really not doing anything. It's what the dollar is doing. It's how much value the dollar is losing,” Schiff explained. “The dollar could lose a lot of value this year. So you may need a lot more dollars to buy an ounce of gold than you do right now.”

That warning, which Schiff has been making for more than a decade, has landed a reputation as being a polarizing figure. Given how often he takes the other side in gold versus Bitcoin debates online (and even with Binance founder CZ recently) you might think he's enjoying a nice victory lap. But when we spoke with him about why he's confident gold's rally will continue — it wasn't all a celebration.

“I've been right for 25 years telling people to buy gold,” Schiff said. “It’s nice to make money… but it's not really something that you want to celebrate because we're really celebrating an economic disaster.”

The scarier part is why people who historically haven't been in Schiff's camp seem to be joining him now. Take, for example, Bridgewater hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio — who has been getting louder about rising odds of an uprising in America. After federal agents killed another U.S. citizen in Minneapolis, Dalio's warning went viral on X.

“From studying 50-plus civil wars and revolutions, it became clear that the single most reliable leading indicator of civil war or revolution is bankrupt government finances combined with big wealth gaps," he wrote. Certainly as U.S. debt explodes and total interest payments on that debt move past defense spending, it's safe to say we are there. But the other condition Dalio flagged is an accelerating wealth transfer to alternative assets as the market shifts away from the nation entering the point of no return.

“As previously mentioned, during the civil war/revolution stage of the cycle the governments in power almost always had an acute shortage of money, credit, and buying power. That shortage created the desire to grab money from those who had it, which led those who had wealth to move it into places and assets that were safe, which led the governments to stop these movements by imposing capital controls—i.e., controls on movements to other jurisdictions (e.g., other countries), to other currencies, or to assets that are more difficult to tax and/or are less productive (e.g., gold).”

The dollar on Tuesday slumped to a four-year low. Gold hit another all-time high at more than $5,200 an ounce. But Schiff doesn’t think this moment is about gold bugs finally being proven right. He thinks it’s about America finally running out of time.

“It’s also important to point out that the big wealth gap is not an accident,” Schiff said. “It is a byproduct of the exact same monetary and fiscal policy that’s destroying the economy. That’s created all the inflation. Government has done that. ... Now, a small minority are just starting to realize it, and that's what's helping to impact the price.”

In Schiff’s telling, the government is both arsonist and firefighter — stoking crises, then selling bigger government as the solution to the fire it started.

“We get a government created crisis, and then the solution is to make government even bigger, to ensure that the next crisis is even worse, which means we get even more government,” Schiff said. “So we constantly lose. We lose when the consequences of the government mistakes blow up, and then we lose again, because now we make even greater mistakes that will blow up even bigger next time.”

While Schiff continued to urge investors to pick gold over Bitcoin due to its relative underperformance over the last few years, he is confident the trends that got gold into record territory are likely to continue.

“The obvious politicization of the Fed, the loss of even the pretense of Fed independence, I think, is weighing heavily on the dollar and is one of the reasons that you're seeing an acceleration into gold and silver to get out of the dollar,” he said.

"The entire time that I have been preparing for an economic disaster, I have advocated for policies that would either mitigate or prevent that from happening," he said. " I knew the mistakes that the government was going to make, and I knew what the consequences of those mistakes would be. And so it's going to be very difficult for a lot of Americans to have to endure what's coming."

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