By Lane Florsheim

E VERY MORNING for the past six months, Isaac Kahan has left his house at 3:30 a.m. to begin his workday on the stretch of 47th Street that comprises New York City's bustling Diamond District. Buying and selling gold has never been a busier vocation.

As the president of Bullion Trading, he sells about $1 million in gold from his storefront every day. Though 1-ounce bars are his most popular offering, Kahan has taken to selling quantities of gold that are so tiny they would have been unthinkable a year or two ago -- as little as 2.5 grams, for around $500.

"I keep on telling my wife that this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, " he says.

Speculators have poured their earnings into all kinds of investments since ancient times, but they always return to gold. The precious metal is a constant in human history -- a store and symbol of wealth for everyone from Egyptian royals entombed in golden masks, to working-class immigrants crossing the Atlantic with gold coins sewn into their belts, to America's 47th president, who gilded the Oval Office at the start of his second term.

Currencies cease circulation, markets fluctuate, tastes shift. Yet gold holds its value, even as its price ebbs and flows. Perhaps now more than ever, its safe-haven status has made it a reliable hedge against a tumultuous world.

"[Gold is] one asset that's easy, global, portable, accepted everywhere, with a 5,000-year history and not likely to go to zero," says Steven Feldman, the CEO and co-founder of GBI, which provides institutional infrastructure for trading and custody of physical precious metals.

Today's inflationary pressure and geopolitical tensions have catapulted its price to unprecedented heights. Gold surpassed $5,300 a troy ounce in January, nearly doubling its spot price from a year earlier. (At publication time, the metal was trading at around $4,800 per troy ounce.)

Its surge in value has driven a modern-day gold rush. People have been lining up at Costco and Walmart to buy gold bars and digging through their jewelry boxes to turn keepsakes into cash. Investors are moving money from retail stocks to gold ETFs; Feldman says his platform has experienced record trading volume.

"You're outpacing inflation, which is good, but you're not going to make a killing off it," says Cory Windelspecht. That hasn't stopped the Hoboken, N.J., resident from taking part. On Wednesday and Thursday mornings, he says, the crowds begin to gather around the jewelry case at his local Costco in Bayonne, waiting for a delivery.

"You can easily spot a mile away who was there waiting to see if the gold came in today," says Windelspecht. "A lot of guys in leather jackets, people in gold sunglasses, not buying anything, just kind of swarming like sharks."

The ongoing frenzy is cause for concern, says Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, the Howard Marks presidential professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania. "This is a bet that the future is going to be much worse," he says.

Or put another way, modern investors are doing as humans have for thousands of years: hoping against hope that a precious metal would secure their futures.

Below, a timeline of the precious metal's place in history and culture.

F LESH OF THE GODS" is how ancient Egyptians described the gold they used to adorn temples and send their nobles into the afterlife. King Tut was famously discovered with his face sheathed in a gold death mask that weighed over 20 pounds. Its association with the divine has carried into the present day: Nearly every major religion uses gold to connote holy objects and spaces.

"Gold retains its warm glow no matter what happens to it," says John Stuart Gordon, the curator of American decorative arts at Yale, who is writing a book on gold in America. "People associate that sense of permanence with a divine quality and a metaphor for things that are eternal, like love between people, devotion to a deity and political power." Even gold wedding bands date back to the ancient world, Gordon says.

Pure gold is virtually indestructible and doesn't rust. "There is the striking fact about gold that every ounce of gold that has ever been dug out of the ground and pounded into an earring or a coin still exists," says H.W. Brands, an American historian.

"We're drawn to the intrinsic beauty of it," says Vanessa Patrick, a professor of marketing at the University of Houston's C.T. Bauer College of Business, whose research likens its effect on our senses to that of a shimmering body of water, which we're evolutionarily programmed to perceive as a vital resource.

When Captain John Smith and the British colonists first came to the Jamestown colony in Virginia in the early 17th century, he recorded two goldsmiths, a jeweler and two refiners on the ship, Gordon says. Their arrival would introduce gold as a form of currency in keeping with European practice.

"The idea of the Americas as a potential source of gold and gold as a source of wealth is written into the colonial experience from the very beginning," he says.

G OLD! Gold from the American River!" Samuel Brannan proclaimed in 1848, trotting a bottle of gold dust around San Francisco and effectively kicking off the Gold Rush. Though the businessman and Mormon missionary never mined for gold himself, he became California's first millionaire by monopolizing the sale of supplies to those who did.

Even before 300,000 people looked West for their shot at great wealth, gold had been the basis of American currency; though people exchanged banknotes on a day-to-day basis, gold was the only thing that was accepted internationally, says Brands. But the Gold Rush changed the meaning of the American dream: No longer content to amass wealth over time, speculators sought out immediate fortunes.

"The idea that you could strike it rich in California with good luck and industry then segued into the fact that people like John Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan could strike it rich," Brands says.

Americans have long turned to gold in times of turmoil and financial anxiety. In the lead-up to the Great Depression, they hoarded coins and bullion, clinging to their wealth.

The U.S. government holds its own vast reserves at Fort Knox -- "our modern-day El Dorado," as Gordon calls it -- which took in its first gold in 1937 and currently safeguards 147.3 million ounces of the metal.

The fortified vault in Kentucky is closed to the public, allowing imaginations to run wild with conspiracies and myths: that the gold is gone or fake, or the vault contains alien objects.

"I think if they ever opened the doors," he says, "we'd probably all be quite disappointed."

"MY WIFE thought I was crazy for buying it in the first place," says Jim Ausman, a technical program manager who lives in San Francisco.

He hadn't grown up with money, but working at a tech company that IPO'd in the late '90s, he was able to make a pretty penny for himself. And he wanted to turn some of it into gold.

"I found a little place in Chinatown with no sign on the doors," Ausman says. "You'd go in there, the guy would lock the door behind you, you'd give him cash, he'd give you gold. I bought 2 pounds."

Since then, he's bought and sold by the world's geopolitical rhythms, at one point making a nearly tenfold return on his physical gold. "Whenever your investments go right, it always makes you feel very clever," he says.

In our present frenzy, we're past the peak of buying and at the point where people are holding, and even selling.

Craig Beauregard used to pick up a few gold bars when they went on sale at Costco, but now when he visits the wholesaler, he only sees silver.

"It always feels good to beat the rush," says Beauregard, a telecommunications construction manager in Massachusetts, though he wishes he and his wife had started buying sooner.

The last time he purchased physical gold, in June 2025, it was $400 for about a gram -- a gold necklace for his wife to celebrate their anniversary.

"The current value is $375, so on that purchase, I'm down $25," he says.

Additional photography by Jackie Kursel for WSJ. Magazine

Write to Lane Florsheim at lane.florsheim@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 16, 2026 14:03 ET (18:03 GMT)

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