MW This is the analyst who has gold bugs thinking $12,000 is not only possible, it's the right price

By Barbara Kollmeyer

The dollar's demise is unavoidable, says Myrmikan Capital's founder

Gold yes, dollar no.

While Tuesday is looking flat for stocks, gold is hanging onto the $5,000 an ounce mark.

It's a level that gold surpassed, lost, reclaimed, lost again, and then once again surpassed on Monday.

Gold's story has in large part been the flip side of faltering confidence in the U.S. dollar and American assets.

The founder and managing member of Myrmikan Capital, Daniel Oliver, says we're in the early phases of a massive bull market for the metal, in a note that has been circulating widely on the X social-media network.

The 16-year old Myrmikan Capital is a specialized hedge fund, focused on micro-capitalized gold and silver mining companies. Also manager of the Myrmikan Gold Fund, Oliver has long argued gold is undervalued.

Mapping out those gold boom phases in a new note to clients, he says the move first began in 2022 when the U.S. froze Russia's dollar holdings, drawing in sophisticated gold investors.

Oliver argues that international capital flows have let U.S. financial institutions "carry insane amounts of debt," and sees private equity at the epicenter of a coming dollar blowup, driving foreign capital away and pushing up funding costs.

That's as Kevin Warsh, President Donald Trump's nominee for the next Fed chair, is headed into a money-printing trap, unable to cut interest rates and shrink the Fed's balance sheet at the same time, he predicts.

Under former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, the central bank after 2008 began buying bonds "en masse" to push up bond prices and lower rates, flooding banks with reserves.

Since then, the Fed has paid interest on bank reserves to keep a floor under rates, and is now paying out far higher rates than the interest it receives on the bonds it holds, with a reported $245 billion in operating losses since 2022, he says. "The whole mechanism requires accelerating money printing and deeper losses at the central bank that issues the nation's currency."

Warsh will face $10 trillion in Treasury bonds that will mature over the next 12 months, which the government will be forced to roll over, says Oliver.

Warsh, despite his stated complaints about bonds on the Fed's balance sheet, will have to turn toward quantitative easing.

"This will be the second phase of the gold bull market, a move that has not yet begun, the move to reflect the market realization that the Fed is powerless to save private equity or control interest rates without buying the entire bond market," he says.

The third phase comes when those higher rates "create a government bond death spiral: the higher the interest rates rise, the larger the interest payments go, the worst the deficits, the greater the supply of Treasurys and the higher rates will rise," he says.

The endgame, Oliver is either the government defaults or orders the central bank to buy all Treasurys, destroying the dollar.

"There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved," he says.

As for where gold should trade, Oliver explains that over history, markets have forced central banks to keep gold reserves at between one third and one half, of their balance sheets, implying a price between $8,395 and $12,595 per ounce. As long-term Treasury bonds are "worth less than where the Fed-manipulated market prices them," a panic could bring those reserves at least temporarily up to 100%, he says.

As for how to play this, Oliver says mining companies remain undervalued, even after a strong run.

Gold mining exchange-traded funds have been underfunded even as those shares have soared, he says, noting the number of shares outstanding for the VanEck Junior Gold Miners ETF GDXJ fell by a third between 2024 and 2026. "This lack of interest suggests we are at the very beginning of the bull market," he says.

That's as gold remains massively underowned by professionals and domestic institutions, he adds.

"The miners will continue to get a boost from the rising gold price, but the real fireworks will begin when the market starts repricing multiples. The senior miners will do well as capital panics into the space. The juniors should do better as their projects become too compelling to ignore," he says. For the first time since founding Myrmikan, junior miners have started turning down financing deals, he notes.

The markets

U.S. stock futures (ES00) (YM00) (NQ00) are mostly flat, as gold (GC00) and silver (SI00) are also a touch weaker.

   Key asset performance                                                Last       5d      1m      YTD     1y 
   S&P 500                                                              6964.82    -0.17%  -0.18%  1.74%   14.81% 
   Nasdaq Composite                                                     23,238.67  -1.50%  -2.09%  -0.01%  17.88% 
   10-year Treasury                                                     4.193      -7.40   0.90    2.10    -33.90 
   Gold                                                                 5053.6     7.96%   9.65%   16.65%  72.08% 
   Oil                                                                  64.26      3.10%   7.39%   11.93%  -11.33% 
   Data: MarketWatch. Treasury yields change expressed in basis points 

The buzz

A delayed December retail sales report is due at 8:30 a.m., alongside import prices for the same month.

CVS Health $(CVS)$ reported a solid quarter, but shares are down.

Ford $(F)$ and Robinhood (HOOD) are due after the bell.

BP shares $(BP)$ are slumping after the oil giant halted stock buybacks

President Trump told Fox News that Fed Chair nominee Warsh can get U.S. growth to 15%, maybe more.

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The chart

Barclays

The chart from Barclays analysts led by Marc Cus Babic, using a New York Fed survey of consumer expectations that lower-income households aren't planning big spending cuts, supports their argument that the U.S. is not seeing a K-shaped economy. "We find that high-income households' share of consumption is smaller than commonly cited, and relative income and wealth gains have been more favorable for low-income consumers than often reported," they said, noting wealth gains for lowest-income households is up more than 50% in the past year.

Top tickers

These were the top-searched tickers on MarketWatch as of 6 a.m.:

   Ticker  Security name 
   NVDA    Nvidia 
   TSLA    Tesla 
   TSM     Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing 
   GME     GameStop 
   PLTR    Palantir Technologies 
   MSFT    Microsoft 
   AMZN    Amazon 
   AMD     Advanced Micro Devices 
   MU      Micron Technology 
   AAPL    Apple 

Random reads

Super Bowl heroes: Bad Bunny's grass dancers.

They don't make Olympic medals like they used to.

-Barbara Kollmeyer

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February 10, 2026 07:10 ET (12:10 GMT)

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