Gold To $35,000? The Math Is Hard To Ignore | Josh Phair

Note from Jackson Before getting into this week's edition, wanted to share some big news on our end: Onramp just closed our Series A. Full announcement is at the bottom of this issue, or you can read it now on onrampbitcoin.com. Now, this week's edition of The Last Trade.

Bitcoin has spent most of 2026 stuck in a range while gold has done what nobody on Wall Street was positioned for: gone from a fuddy-duddy 60/40 footnote to a sovereign battleground. China is the longest continuously-buying central bank in the world. Poland is moving to 37% gold backing. The Gulf is selling, China is absorbing, and the United States just contracted JP Morgan to bid the dips in silver. The "metal wars" are not a metaphor anymore. They are the trade book of the back half of this decade.

On this week's episode of The Last Trade, we sat down with Josh Phair, founder and CEO of Scottsdale Mint and CEO of the Wyoming Reserve Opportunity Zone Fund, to discuss the geopolitical re-rating of gold, the Phair-Sinclair ratio and the math behind $35,000 gold, Wyoming's selection of his vault over JP Morgan for the state's first physical gold allocation, why the debasement trade is downstream of distrust, what the Iranian stablecoin seizure proved about permissioned money, and how the new institutional portfolio holds both gold and Bitcoin under one custody umbrella.

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The metal wars are no longer a metaphor

• Western banks and Western governments used to set the gold price. That control has been broken. China's People's Bank is the longest continuously-buying central bank in the world, and the BRICS bloc has been printing fiat and buying physical at a pace that does not respect price.
• The signal in silver is even sharper. Josh flagged that China's March silver imports were the largest single-month total in 20 years. Silver is now on the US critical minerals list, and these are not portfolio decisions. They are technology-stack and military-stack decisions.
• Poland announced a move to 37% gold backing of its assets this year, with roughly one third of that custodied at the New York Fed. Front-line nations are reaching for gold as war collateral, not as a portfolio diversifier.
• The Gulf states have been forced sellers. They needed liquidity to meet obligations. The marginal buyer has been China. The price barely budged because the bid is price-insensitive and the trade is reserve accumulation.
• Josh's framing was the clean one: whoever holds the most gold makes the rules, but you need a military to protect it. Gold is becoming a real-time read on which sovereigns are preparing for which outcomes.

Investor takeaway When central banks treat gold as war financing rather than an inflation hedge, the marginal pricing mechanism is not the futures curve. It is geopolitics itself.

The Phair-Sinclair math is hard to dismiss

• Jim Sinclair built a ratio in the 1970s: take the reserve currency's foreign debt obligations and the value of its gold holdings, and solve for the gold price that balances the two. Josh has revived and updated it as the Phair-Sinclair ratio. That ratio has been hit twice in 50 years: gold $887 in 1980 and roughly $1,650 in 2011.
• Run the same exercise today, and the math now resolves toward $35,000. Josh isn't predicting it as a target. He's saying the conditions that produced the prior two balance points are present again: fiscal dominance, foreign creditors short of hard reserves, and monetary pressure.
• The number sounds outlandish only because the denominator has run away. In 1980, gold and global equities were each roughly $2.5 trillion in size, at parity. Today, global equities are around $150 trillion, gold is around $30 trillion, and Bitcoin sits at about $1.6 trillion.
• Sinclair's first call required an 8x move when most allocators thought gold was a relic. He nailed it within a few dollars. The 70s playbook ran fiscal dominance, hot inflation, and creditors short of hard reserves. The 2020s playbook reads almost too cleanly.
• Even a steady-state framing tells the same story. Blended gold-and-silver returns have averaged ~7% per year over 15 years, and that's before the last 12 months of outsized moves. Whether the ratio re-tags $35k is one debate. That hard money is structurally under-owned by every traditional portfolio is not.

Investor takeaway If global equities double again while gold's float stays roughly fixed, $35,000 stops being a forecast and becomes an arithmetic identity. Gold doesn't need to rally. It needs to clear.

Wyoming just wrote the state playbook for physical gold

• Wyoming runs roughly $50 billion in liquid assets and a $33 billion mineral trust, for a population of 550,000. It is, functionally, a sovereign wealth fund. And it just selected Wyoming Reserve over JP Morgan to vault the state's first physical gold allocation.
• Three years of testimony preceded the law. Josh's pitch to the legislature was not normative. He didn't tell Wyoming what to do. He told them what every other sovereign was already doing and let the statute catch up to the trade.
• The vault is a 60,000-square-foot facility inside a foreign trade zone, third-party audited and physically counted every quarter, with US Customs running a second audit overlay. It is the operational answer to the "decentralization theater" critique: real custody, real jurisdiction, real ledger.
• Wyoming law breaks third-party custody liens after two years. No other state has that statute. It is the single most important property-rights feature for clients who do not want their hard assets entangled in another firm's bankruptcy estate.
• Texas has now selected Scottsdale Mint to produce its commemorative state gold and silver coins. Josh's prediction is that US states will start managing gold balances on the scale of mid-sized European nations within this decade. The playbook is already built.

Investor takeaway State-level gold purchases are the physical-asset analog to state Bitcoin reserves. Once one state moves and the playbook exists, the others follow on a much shorter horizon than federal policy.

The debasement trade is downstream of distrust

• Brian asked Josh what most explained the revitalization of the debasement trade after a decade in the wilderness. The answer wasn't inflation, wasn't valuations, wasn't even central-bank buying. It was distrust.
• Pick any country. Do citizens trust their politicians? Their banks? The inflation methodology? Do governments trust each other? When trust collapses at every layer of the financial system, allocators rotate into assets that do not require it.
• Bonds have been quietly replaced at certain institutional levels with gold. Not officially. Not loudly. But in the trade blotter. Negative real yields plus credit risk plus duration risk minus trust no longer underwrites the 60/40.
• Real estate is the natural alternative, but it is tethered to the credit market. When credit tightens, cap rates blow out and prices reset. Hard money assets, by construction, are not tethered to anyone else's balance sheet.
• Morgan Stanley's CIO floated a 60-20-20 portfolio last fall: 60% equities, 20% bonds, 20% gold. The number barely got covered. The point isn't that one bank is now bullish gold. The point is that the institutional default allocation is being rewritten in real time.

Investor takeaway When distrust becomes the dominant macro variable, hard money stops being a yield-and-diversification trade and starts being a structural answer to "who is on the other side of my balance sheet?"

Quote of the week "Whoever holds the most gold makes the rules. But you also have to have a military to protect it and defend it." — Josh Phair, on the geopolitical re-rating of gold

The Iran seizure made the permissionless argument concrete

• The US recently seized Iranian-held stablecoin assets. The lesson was not subtle: programmable money is permissioned money, and permissioned money is seizable at the issuer level by whichever government has jurisdiction over the issuer.
• That is the reason stablecoins are tolerated by the political establishment in the US. They are not competition for the dollar. They are a liquidity sponge for Treasuries, with a kill switch the banking-and-government complex can pull.
• Bitcoin's permissionlessness, by contrast, becomes the feature the moment an investor watches a state freeze a "decentralized" asset in real time. The market is now stress-testing which assets are actually censorship-resistant and which only market themselves that way.
• The geopolitical layer reinforces the trade. CBDCs are being backdoored through stablecoin rails: King Charles' "sensible money" speech, Europe's pilot programs, the quiet US acceptance of yield-bearing stablecoin Treasury demand. The destination is the same regardless of the route.
• The investor implication is brutal in its simplicity. If your hard-money exposure runs through a permissioned wrapper, you do not actually own the asset you think you own. The allocation question is which assets remain yours under stress.

Investor takeaway When sovereign actors demonstrate they can freeze programmable money on demand, the only "hard" assets are those whose property rights survive a political decision someone else makes.

Gold and Bitcoin are now one portfolio decision

• Josh has been running Bitcoin as a treasury asset since before Strategy, without debt. The Wyoming Reserve fund holds up to 10% Bitcoin against its physical gold balance and uses a Harvard-style endowment moving-average model to size the position in and out.
• The "maxi" framing on either side is now a tell. Both assets answer the same question: what do you hold when the system you operate in stops being trustworthy? They just optimize for different stress paths.
• The most hated rally is still being hated. Crypto influencer viewership has collapsed, the channels are quiet, and the consensus call is Bitcoin in the $30k to $50k range. That is what the bottom of a sentiment cycle looks like, not the top.
• The same trust company Josh works with on the gold side is now standing up an omnibus account for Bitcoin holders who want to combine physical metal and hard-wallet holdings under one custody umbrella. The plumbing for the dual-asset portfolio is being built right now.
• The point Michael keeps landing matters. Serious capital (call it $10M, $100M, eventually $1B) will demand custody that is trust-minimized, jurisdictionally clean, and built for both asset classes. That demand precedes the product, which is exactly the open water Onramp and firms like Wyoming Reserve are operating in.

Investor takeaway The next decade won't be gold versus Bitcoin. It will be allocators choosing between hard-money portfolios that solve for trust and paper portfolios that still assume it.

Onramp news Read the full announcement on onrampbitcoin.com

🎙 The Last Trade · This week's episode Gold to $35,000? The Math Is Hard to Ignore Josh Phair (Scottsdale Mint, Wyoming Reserve) on the metal wars, the Phair-Sinclair ratio, Wyoming's selection of his vault over JP Morgan, and why permissionless money matters more after the Iran seizure. ▶  YouTube Spotify Apple New episodes every Thursday. Subscribe so you don't miss the next one.