In normal times, the price of gold would not be among the day’s talking points around these parts, but doom scrolling calls for a delicate balance between stocking your mind and losing it entirely.
The rise and fall of precious metal prices in the markets is a niche interest, apart from that time when gold buyers were doing pop-ups in shopping centres. But when the Financial Times leads with the news that gold bullion has “stormed through the milestone of $5,000 per troy ounce”, it seems worth a pause.
Historic gold surges are linked to rising global tensions, volatility and uncertainty. Prices went above $1,000 during the 2008 crash and above $2,000 during the pandemic. In 2025, the first year of King Donald’s second reign, it sped past €3,000 and €4,000. A month into 2026, it’s already at $5,000, with no sign of a slowdown.
In analyst-speak, investors “are price insensitive to gold now, as they expect this momentum to continue”. Translation: they will pay any amount to protect their cash from the raving king’s volatility and they see no end to it.
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The big problem for the rest of us is that we are the opposite of price insensitive. What the analysts are really talking about, as always, is the lives and livelihoods of ordinary people. Jobs, pensions, stability, world peace.
It’s 12 years since Mark Carney as Bank of England governor unsettled another glitzy gathering with a speech. Capitalism was eating itself, he told a City of London conference. “Just as any revolution eats its children, unchecked market fundamentalism can devour the social capital essential for the long-term dynamism of capitalism itself … Prosperity requires not just investment in economic capital, but investment in social capital”. Christine Lagarde, then head of the IMF, used much the same language that week. Within two years, Trump mark 1 and Brexit would be launched upon the world and trust in the electoral system virtually destroyed by the tech bros of Cambridge Analytica and their US handlers, all of it conceived and paid for by shadowy billionaires, industrialists and hedge funders.
If I had a euro for every time an earnest commentator has warned that Ireland was disastrously dependent on US multinationals, and therefore on Trump’s sanity and America’s wellbeing, the proceeds might be shaping into a ritzy doomsday bunker, the kind the “price insensitive” folks are preparing for themselves. I’ve already salvaged an old battery radio and bought Aldi torches the size of small lighthouses. Casual chats reveal that others are laying down batteries and stocks of dried and tinned food, flour, toilet rolls, medication, etc. Rainwater is being harvested. Small internal rooms and basements are being eyed as refuges.
One man’s 14-year-old is concerned that his family is turning into “doom preppers”. Our Office of Emergency Planning in the Department of Defence is calling it “household resilience”. That DoD leaflet soon to pop into your postbox is about preparing for extreme weather emergencies and loss of essential services such as water, power and communications for up to 72 hours. The 14-year-old’s father is thinking more broadly – invasion, war, climate disaster, nuclear fallout, the catastrophic potential of AI. He doesn’t seem silly any more.
It is a duty to watch the distressing recordings of the murder of nurse Alex Pretti by masked, armed thugs on Trump’s retribution tour. The haunting frame-by-frame evidence placed beside the regime’s contemptuously brazen denials feel like the death knell for an era we took for granted, for Reagan’s “shining city on a hill”.
[ Watch: Video shows moments around fatal shooting of Alex Pretti in MinneapolisOpens in new window ]
The much-coveted Northern Sea Route is opening up only because rising temperatures are causing the Greenland ice sheet to break up at a rate of 280 billion tonnes a year. A looming global catastrophe merely signifies a land grab for the world’s most powerful politician and his enablers. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has just had to negotiate a fourth temporary ceasefire between Russian occupiers and Ukraine to enable urgent repairs to the vulnerable Zaporizhzhia plant, Europe’s largest. Ukraine’s bloody frontline is nearer than we think.
But the tech billionaires reckoned they could control a raging bull with their pathetic golden soothers, always knowing they have their apocalypse insurance. When Ilya Sutskever, chief scientist and co-founder of Open AI (begetter of ChatGPT), thought they were on the brink of developing artificial general intelligence, he suggested they should dig an underground shelter for the company’s top scientists before such a powerful technology was unleashed on the world, according to author Karen Hao.
UFC enthusiast Mark Zuckerberg denied last year that he was creating a 5,000sq ft doomsday bunker on his 1,400-acre Hawaiian compound. “It’s just like a little shelter, it’s like a basement,” he said, according to Wired magazine. Meanwhile his testosterone-pumped alpha bros are colonising parts of New Zealand with their bunkers or plotting escape routes to Mars. All while US citizens are being assaulted, kidnapped and murdered by the regime the bros happily support.
Alex Pretti, remember, was murdered while protecting a woman and recording the agents of a rogue president sworn to protect the constitution. We know that 77 million Americans voted for Trump knowing what he was made of, but we can also see the extraordinary courage of ordinary, dissenting US citizens out on the streets armed with nothing more than whistles. That should tell us something about ourselves.
[ Trump is ‘power-crazy’ and Board of Peace a delusion of power, Mary Robinson saysOpens in new window ]
A crystal bowl of shamrock humbly presented to the man who gave Conor McGregor the White House podium on our national day last year? There’s a three word riposte for that. It begins with “go” and ends with “yourselves”.
