
You do not need to bet on dollar collapse to take this seriously.
The de-dollarization story is a slow, structural shift, with central banks diversifying, gold back in favor, and a handful of practical moves that fit the trend without requiring a doomsday view.
VanEck's November 2025 report on gold is direct, calling gold "a structural necessity in diversified portfolios" and saying it has moved from cyclical safe haven to long-term core holding.
Their numbers tell the story: gold up 50% year-to-date in 2025, gold miners up over 120%, and average all-in sustaining costs around $1,600 per ounce, which means producers are running at record margins with gold above $4,000.
VanEck's 2030 price target is $5,000 per ounce, and Amundi's research center lands in a similar place, with a 2028 target of $5,000 in its October 2025 "Gold Beyond Records" report.
Amundi names the move "the beginning of a gradual transition from a US-centric international monetary system to a more multipolar one," and both firms point to the same drivers: central bank diversification, geopolitical risk, sovereign debt concerns, and Western investor return after years of gold ETF outflows.
A few moves match the data without requiring a dollar-collapse thesis:
None of these are panic moves, just slow, structural responses to a slow, structural shift.
In the World Gold Council survey of central banks, the direction was nearly unanimous, with no central bank expecting its gold holdings to fall over the following five years (per past surveys cited in Amundi's analysis).
That is the cleanest data in this entire conversation, since reserve managers are not retail traders and they run multi-decade horizons. When they vote with their gold, they are voting on what they trust to hold value when the next crisis hits.
Per Amundi, central bank gold demand accounts for roughly 20% of total annual gold demand right now, up from about 10% in the 2010s. The biggest 2024 buyers - Poland (90 tonnes), Turkey (75 tonnes), India (73 tonnes), and China (44 tonnes) - are the same emerging-market central banks that have driven the de-dollarization conversation in the first place.
The dollar is not going anywhere fast, but its monopoly already is.
A 5% gold allocation in a 60-40 portfolio would not have prevented every drawdown of the past decade, but it would have helped at every major risk event - which is what diversification does for a living.