July 14, 2025 • 12 mins
Gold is one of the world’s oldest investments. In 2025, it came into the spotlight as a haven for investors concerned about the volatility of our economic markets.
About two months ago, it reached its highest price ever - around $3,800 an ounce. That's a pretty big deal when you consider that just five years ago, an ounce of gold was worth about half that amount. When gold prices soar like this, it can impact everything from the jewellery you might buy to the broader Australian economy.
On today’s podcast, we’re going to look at what has driven the spike in the price of gold, and the mechanics of actually buying the shiny stuff.
Hosts: Sam Koslowski and Billi FitzSimons
Producer: Orla Maher
Thanks to FoodSwitch for supporting this episode – head to foodswitch.com.au to download the free app and try it out at your next grocery shop.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Already and this is this is the Daily OS.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
This is the Daily ohs oh, now it makes sense.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Good morning, and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Tuesday,
the fifteenth of July. I'm Sam Kazowski.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
I'm Billy fit Simon's.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Gold is one of the world's oldest investments. In twenty
twenty five, it came into the spotlight as a haven
for investors concerned about the volatility of our economic markets.
Almost two months ago, it reached its highest price ever
around three eight hundred US dollars announce. Now that's a
pretty big deal when you consider that just five years
(00:41):
ago an ounce of gold was worth about half that amount.
When gold saws like this, it can impact everything from
the jewelry that you might buy to the broader Australian economy.
So on today's podcast, we're going to look at what
has driven this spike in the price of gold and
the mechanics of actually buying the shiny stuff.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Sam, before we get into this and why exactly the
price of gold has gone up by so much. My
understanding of when this kind of thing happens with gold
specifically is during uncertain times. And so I guess my
first question is what is it about right now that
I guess is so uncertain Which might sound like a
silly question because you know no such thing, but and
(01:26):
I know what's going on I guess in the world.
But how uncertain is today compared to other periods of time?
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Well, in that question, there's a lot of really interesting stuff.
I mean, I think what's making this moment special for
the price of gold is the number of different factors
all coming together at once. And if you think about it,
there's you know, the uncertainty around the conflicts in the
Middle East. There's the ongoing US China trade tensions, the
rollout of various tariffs by the Trump administration, and all
(01:57):
of that together has led to an air of uncertainty.
And there's one thing that investors pay particular attention to,
not just for gold, but for any stocks, and that's
where are the central banks putting their money? And where
are central banks investing? And some central banks over the
last couple of months, including China and Russia, having buying
masses of gold, and that make sure that they're not
(02:19):
to reliant on the US dollar or US government bonds.
And when you get these large orders of gold coming
through that can often put the price up.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
And when you say central banks, yeah, that's country's main
banks exactly.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
So if you think about the Gringotts vaults of countries,
they want more gold in those vaults rather than say
shares and tech companies or US dollars or euros. They're
looking at gold right now because they think that is
the safest thing to have amidst all the uncertainty.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
And so what makes gold so appealing to investors during
uncertain times?
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Well, I guess it's all to do with this idea
of gold being what investors a safe haven, and it's
the name given to a property that you can buy
in times of crisis or uncertainty because it tends to
hold its value, or at least if it does go
up and down, it tends to go up and down
a little slower and more predictably. So I want you
to imagine that you're running an investment company and your
(03:18):
job is to take other people's money and make more
money from it. And then news breaks of a virus,
you know it might be hypothetically in about March twenty twenty,
and all of a sudden, those companies that you're invested
in might not be able to run in the way
that they did before the virus arrived. You're going to
look for stuff to invest in that won't be as
affected by border closures or by people getting sick. You
(03:42):
can almost apply that same rationale to the last six
months or so in terms of war or tariffs, and
when you're looking for something that's not affected by economic
or global chaos, it tends to always come back to gold.
That hasn't exactly answered your question in terms of what
is it about the gold that makes it so immune,
And I'd say that there's a few key factors there.
(04:04):
One is that gold doesn't have the same risk that
a company has in terms of a company can go under,
it can owe you money, it can make your shares
be worth zero the next day. Gold doesn't rely on
anyone else to pay you back. You've either got gold
or you don't.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
Have gold, because it's a physical thing.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Exactly if you know, the shared deposit might be where
you're putting a bet on. Essentially, I'm a company doing well.
You are putting a bet on people wanting more gold
in the future than they are today. But even if
they don't, you still have the gold, and it's globally accepted.
I mean, this is something that is recognized around the world.
It's got this amazing historic context of you know, think
(04:41):
back to ancient civilizations and gold was the way that
you exhibited wealth and you exhibited status. And you can't
make more of it. You can't print more gold like
you can print more money. You can dig for it,
but digging for gold takes a lot of time and
resources itself. And then the last reason is that gold
just has this enduring quality. I mean, that's I guess
(05:03):
romantically why it's used for wedding bands is it's durable,
it's rare, it's easily split up into a number of
different pieces, and you can move it around. And all
of that means that you can get a large value
of this incredibly valuable stuff into a small amount of
space that people are going to want years and decades
into the future.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
It's interesting because gold on its own doesn't actually produce anything, obviously,
and so it's not like investing in a company that
makes products.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
For example, exactly. I mean, the weird thing about investing
in gold is that it just sits there.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
But it does get used for things like jewelry.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
It does definitely, and that's where often consumers can feel
the impact of rising gold prices. So jewelers will buy
their gold from organizations called bullion dealers. They might also
buy it from mining companies or other types of wholestalers,
but bullion dealers are the main ones, and billion dealers
literally have the gold bars sitting in a safe somewhere.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
But so then, isn't it in that sense it is
like a normal company that sells products.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
Well, those are companies, yeah, those are. So you can
invest in companies that trade in gold, like you can
invest in companies that trade in technology. But what we're
talking about here is actually investing in the gold. So
if you jumped on the Australian stock market, you can
buy stocks in gold distribution companies and gold dealers and
gold miners. That's different to buying the actual gold itself
(06:27):
and buying, you know, essentially a loaned amount of gold
that somebody else will hold on your behalf. I mean,
you can hold your own gold, but that comes with
a whole lot of security and logistics risks that most
of us don't really want to take.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
Okay, so let's say that I do want to invest
in gold cool love sold you. How would one actually
do that, either through the ASX or through buying a
physical gold.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Bar exactly, so you can buy the physical gold. There
are ways to do that. I think, how do you
do that? I've never bought a gold bar before, But
there are trading platforms and retailers essentially where you can
go into probably the middle of your closest CBD and
actually trade in gold. And I mean, if you think
(07:12):
about it really tangibly right now, if you were to
buy an ounce of gold, you would pay about thirty
three hundred US dollars, So you'd go into a shop,
pay thirty three hundred, walk out with your gold. If
gold went up, you could walk back into that shop
in six months time and they would pay you thirty
six hundred dollars for that ounce, so you've made that profit.
That's the really tangible way to do it. Now. Of course,
(07:33):
most of us, if we wanted to trade in gold,
we wouldn't have that ability. So you can buy stocks
in gold, and that's different again to buying stocks of
companies that play around with gold. You can actually buy
you know, ETFs for example, exchange traded funds that are
driven by the price of gold, So it's a little
bit abstract when you get to the kind of non
(07:54):
tangible part of gold. You know, there are also gold
mining companies. As I said, it's all centralize though, on
the value of the price of gold, because if more
people want to pay more for gold, than the mining
companies will be worth more as well.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
For anyone listening who doesn't necessarily invest, how does something
like this, like the price of gold going up by
so much, how does this affect them, if at all?
Speaker 1 (08:17):
Well, I think the most tangible way would be the
price of jewelry, and what happens when gold prices spike
like they have recently. Jewelers have to pay more for
their raw materials that they then melt down and make
into the jewelry that you and I buy. Now, they've
got a choice in front of them. They can either
pass that cost onto consumers, or they can absorb that
(08:40):
cost themselves and make less on their margin. But if
you are planning to buy an engagement ring or a
wedding band, you are looking across the board generally at
higher prices than you would have, say, a year ago.
But it's not just those big ticket items. It's smaller
things like earrings or chains, all of that can become
more costly as gold is worth more, and I think
(09:02):
that that's probably the most tangible way that people can
sense it. But it also has knock on effects in
terms of inflation in an economy, because if the cost
of something like metals goes up, then it tends to
have a knock on effect to everything else that we
buy in an economy.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
And so it's basically supply and demand. There is a
lot more demand at the moment for gold, and therefore
the supply is harder and therefore more expensive exactly.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
And where the safe haven thing comes back in is
there's more demand. And it's pretty reasonable to say that
that demand is not going to fall off a cliff
in the next five to ten fifty one hundred years.
It's hard to imagine a world where we don't love
gold anymore. And I'm not giving financial advice, and that's
very dangerous. But it's a long history, way back to
(09:46):
the Pharaohs.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Well, I was going to say, many moons ago, I
read Barefoot Investor, which is written by Scott Pape, and
I remember he had a section on investing in gold,
and he actually wasn't exactly for that. It had something
to do with dividends and not providing dividends like other
shares do. Do you know that line of thinking, I
(10:08):
guess totally.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
It's one of the key kind of warnings against investing
in gold as an investment strategy, and it basically is
about this idea of if it's not paying a dividend,
and if you're only going to get back your money
from your investment when you sell gold, hopefully at a
higher price, there's no kind of points along the way
to take a bit of money off the table. And
all that's to do with risk. But the other thing
(10:30):
to be careful of, according to financial advisors, is about
buzz and hype. And so if you're buying something just
because you think that other people are going to want
it more than you want it right now, then what
comes up may come down, and it can be just
as volatile as other investments.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
So it's not a perfect solution.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
No, And it does trade on fear, right. It trades
on this idea that when it seems like the world
is falling apart, that gold will go up. And that
also means then that when things calm down and get better.
Gold prices can drop pretty quickly and people put their
money back into high risk tech plays or different countries
or different currencies. So there's no silver bullet or in
(11:12):
this case, a gold bullet that can protect you. Thank
you that that can protect you from everything that's happening
in the economy. But hopefully I think after that we
have a bit of a better sense of what buying
gold actually means.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Yeah, I definitely have a better sense now because I've
been seeing all of these headlines. But I think that
sums it up really well with my sam And if
you want more financial explainers from the Daily Ohs, we
actually have a weekly newsletter dedicated to just that, so
we will put a link to that in today's description.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of
The Daily OS. We'll be back this afternoon with your
(11:45):
evening headlines, but until then, have a great day.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Aarunda
Bungelung Calcuttin woman from Gadigal Country.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
The Daily Os ignore ledges that this podcast is recorded
on the lands of the Gadigal people and pays respect
to all Aboriginal and torrest rate, island and nations. We
pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries,
both past and present.
Already and this is this is the Daily OS.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
This is the Daily ohs oh, now it makes sense.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Good morning, and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Tuesday,
the fifteenth of July. I'm Sam Kazowski.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
I'm Billy fit Simon's.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Gold is one of the world's oldest investments. In twenty
twenty five, it came into the spotlight as a haven
for investors concerned about the volatility of our economic markets.
Almost two months ago, it reached its highest price ever
around three eight hundred US dollars announce. Now that's a
pretty big deal when you consider that just five years
(00:41):
ago an ounce of gold was worth about half that amount.
When gold saws like this, it can impact everything from
the jewelry that you might buy to the broader Australian economy.
So on today's podcast, we're going to look at what
has driven this spike in the price of gold and
the mechanics of actually buying the shiny stuff.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Sam, before we get into this and why exactly the
price of gold has gone up by so much. My
understanding of when this kind of thing happens with gold
specifically is during uncertain times. And so I guess my
first question is what is it about right now that
I guess is so uncertain Which might sound like a
silly question because you know no such thing, but and
(01:26):
I know what's going on I guess in the world.
But how uncertain is today compared to other periods of time?
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Well, in that question, there's a lot of really interesting stuff.
I mean, I think what's making this moment special for
the price of gold is the number of different factors
all coming together at once. And if you think about it,
there's you know, the uncertainty around the conflicts in the
Middle East. There's the ongoing US China trade tensions, the
rollout of various tariffs by the Trump administration, and all
(01:57):
of that together has led to an air of uncertainty.
And there's one thing that investors pay particular attention to,
not just for gold, but for any stocks, and that's
where are the central banks putting their money? And where
are central banks investing? And some central banks over the
last couple of months, including China and Russia, having buying
masses of gold, and that make sure that they're not
(02:19):
to reliant on the US dollar or US government bonds.
And when you get these large orders of gold coming
through that can often put the price up.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
And when you say central banks, yeah, that's country's main
banks exactly.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
So if you think about the Gringotts vaults of countries,
they want more gold in those vaults rather than say
shares and tech companies or US dollars or euros. They're
looking at gold right now because they think that is
the safest thing to have amidst all the uncertainty.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
And so what makes gold so appealing to investors during
uncertain times?
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Well, I guess it's all to do with this idea
of gold being what investors a safe haven, and it's
the name given to a property that you can buy
in times of crisis or uncertainty because it tends to
hold its value, or at least if it does go
up and down, it tends to go up and down
a little slower and more predictably. So I want you
to imagine that you're running an investment company and your
(03:18):
job is to take other people's money and make more
money from it. And then news breaks of a virus,
you know it might be hypothetically in about March twenty twenty,
and all of a sudden, those companies that you're invested
in might not be able to run in the way
that they did before the virus arrived. You're going to
look for stuff to invest in that won't be as
affected by border closures or by people getting sick. You
(03:42):
can almost apply that same rationale to the last six
months or so in terms of war or tariffs, and
when you're looking for something that's not affected by economic
or global chaos, it tends to always come back to gold.
That hasn't exactly answered your question in terms of what
is it about the gold that makes it so immune,
And I'd say that there's a few key factors there.
(04:04):
One is that gold doesn't have the same risk that
a company has in terms of a company can go under,
it can owe you money, it can make your shares
be worth zero the next day. Gold doesn't rely on
anyone else to pay you back. You've either got gold
or you don't.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
Have gold, because it's a physical thing.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Exactly if you know, the shared deposit might be where
you're putting a bet on. Essentially, I'm a company doing well.
You are putting a bet on people wanting more gold
in the future than they are today. But even if
they don't, you still have the gold, and it's globally accepted.
I mean, this is something that is recognized around the world.
It's got this amazing historic context of you know, think
(04:41):
back to ancient civilizations and gold was the way that
you exhibited wealth and you exhibited status. And you can't
make more of it. You can't print more gold like
you can print more money. You can dig for it,
but digging for gold takes a lot of time and
resources itself. And then the last reason is that gold
just has this enduring quality. I mean, that's I guess
(05:03):
romantically why it's used for wedding bands is it's durable,
it's rare, it's easily split up into a number of
different pieces, and you can move it around. And all
of that means that you can get a large value
of this incredibly valuable stuff into a small amount of
space that people are going to want years and decades
into the future.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
It's interesting because gold on its own doesn't actually produce anything, obviously,
and so it's not like investing in a company that
makes products.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
For example, exactly. I mean, the weird thing about investing
in gold is that it just sits there.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
But it does get used for things like jewelry.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
It does definitely, and that's where often consumers can feel
the impact of rising gold prices. So jewelers will buy
their gold from organizations called bullion dealers. They might also
buy it from mining companies or other types of wholestalers,
but bullion dealers are the main ones, and billion dealers
literally have the gold bars sitting in a safe somewhere.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
But so then, isn't it in that sense it is
like a normal company that sells products.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
Well, those are companies, yeah, those are. So you can
invest in companies that trade in gold, like you can
invest in companies that trade in technology. But what we're
talking about here is actually investing in the gold. So
if you jumped on the Australian stock market, you can
buy stocks in gold distribution companies and gold dealers and
gold miners. That's different to buying the actual gold itself
(06:27):
and buying, you know, essentially a loaned amount of gold
that somebody else will hold on your behalf. I mean,
you can hold your own gold, but that comes with
a whole lot of security and logistics risks that most
of us don't really want to take.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
Okay, so let's say that I do want to invest
in gold cool love sold you. How would one actually
do that, either through the ASX or through buying a
physical gold.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Bar exactly, so you can buy the physical gold. There
are ways to do that. I think, how do you
do that? I've never bought a gold bar before, But
there are trading platforms and retailers essentially where you can
go into probably the middle of your closest CBD and
actually trade in gold. And I mean, if you think
(07:12):
about it really tangibly right now, if you were to
buy an ounce of gold, you would pay about thirty
three hundred US dollars, So you'd go into a shop,
pay thirty three hundred, walk out with your gold. If
gold went up, you could walk back into that shop
in six months time and they would pay you thirty
six hundred dollars for that ounce, so you've made that profit.
That's the really tangible way to do it. Now. Of course,
(07:33):
most of us, if we wanted to trade in gold,
we wouldn't have that ability. So you can buy stocks
in gold, and that's different again to buying stocks of
companies that play around with gold. You can actually buy
you know, ETFs for example, exchange traded funds that are
driven by the price of gold, So it's a little
bit abstract when you get to the kind of non
(07:54):
tangible part of gold. You know, there are also gold
mining companies. As I said, it's all centralize though, on
the value of the price of gold, because if more
people want to pay more for gold, than the mining
companies will be worth more as well.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
For anyone listening who doesn't necessarily invest, how does something
like this, like the price of gold going up by
so much, how does this affect them, if at all?
Speaker 1 (08:17):
Well, I think the most tangible way would be the
price of jewelry, and what happens when gold prices spike
like they have recently. Jewelers have to pay more for
their raw materials that they then melt down and make
into the jewelry that you and I buy. Now, they've
got a choice in front of them. They can either
pass that cost onto consumers, or they can absorb that
(08:40):
cost themselves and make less on their margin. But if
you are planning to buy an engagement ring or a
wedding band, you are looking across the board generally at
higher prices than you would have, say, a year ago.
But it's not just those big ticket items. It's smaller
things like earrings or chains, all of that can become
more costly as gold is worth more, and I think
(09:02):
that that's probably the most tangible way that people can
sense it. But it also has knock on effects in
terms of inflation in an economy, because if the cost
of something like metals goes up, then it tends to
have a knock on effect to everything else that we
buy in an economy.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
And so it's basically supply and demand. There is a
lot more demand at the moment for gold, and therefore
the supply is harder and therefore more expensive exactly.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
And where the safe haven thing comes back in is
there's more demand. And it's pretty reasonable to say that
that demand is not going to fall off a cliff
in the next five to ten fifty one hundred years.
It's hard to imagine a world where we don't love
gold anymore. And I'm not giving financial advice, and that's
very dangerous. But it's a long history, way back to
(09:46):
the Pharaohs.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Well, I was going to say, many moons ago, I
read Barefoot Investor, which is written by Scott Pape, and
I remember he had a section on investing in gold,
and he actually wasn't exactly for that. It had something
to do with dividends and not providing dividends like other
shares do. Do you know that line of thinking, I
(10:08):
guess totally.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
It's one of the key kind of warnings against investing
in gold as an investment strategy, and it basically is
about this idea of if it's not paying a dividend,
and if you're only going to get back your money
from your investment when you sell gold, hopefully at a
higher price, there's no kind of points along the way
to take a bit of money off the table. And
all that's to do with risk. But the other thing
(10:30):
to be careful of, according to financial advisors, is about
buzz and hype. And so if you're buying something just
because you think that other people are going to want
it more than you want it right now, then what
comes up may come down, and it can be just
as volatile as other investments.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
So it's not a perfect solution.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
No, And it does trade on fear, right. It trades
on this idea that when it seems like the world
is falling apart, that gold will go up. And that
also means then that when things calm down and get better.
Gold prices can drop pretty quickly and people put their
money back into high risk tech plays or different countries
or different currencies. So there's no silver bullet or in
(11:12):
this case, a gold bullet that can protect you. Thank
you that that can protect you from everything that's happening
in the economy. But hopefully I think after that we
have a bit of a better sense of what buying
gold actually means.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Yeah, I definitely have a better sense now because I've
been seeing all of these headlines. But I think that
sums it up really well with my sam And if
you want more financial explainers from the Daily Ohs, we
actually have a weekly newsletter dedicated to just that, so
we will put a link to that in today's description.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of
The Daily OS. We'll be back this afternoon with your
(11:45):
evening headlines, but until then, have a great day.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Aarunda
Bungelung Calcuttin woman from Gadigal Country.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
The Daily Os ignore ledges that this podcast is recorded
on the lands of the Gadigal people and pays respect
to all Aboriginal and torrest rate, island and nations. We
pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries,
both past and present.
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