In the heart of New York's diamond district, in a little second floor shop, Oshri Reuven, owner of Global Gold and Silver, is sifting through some of the business that's come in this week. “On my desk right now, I have assorted jewelry,” he explained. “Here is an earring that went missing; I’ve got a lot of different, cool rings… This ring here had a gold coin inside.” 

Reuven started Global Gold and Silver back in 2001, when gold was worth less than $200 an ounce. The company buys up jewelry, coins and trinkets from people and sells them, mostly to be melted down. 

Reuven’s business has doubled in the last eight weeks. People are flocking to his shop, hoping to cash in on this moment. And this is the moment to cash in. Gold prices have been on a tear — this week, they hit an all time high of $3,500 an ounce. That means each of the little, plastic containers brimming with jewelry, sitting on Reuven's desk, is worth a lot.  

“Here, I’ll even weigh it for you,” he offered. He carefully poured the contents of the container onto a digital scale. “Let's see, you have about 191 grams of gold… So this is worth a little over $11,000.”  The container is about the size of a block of cream cheese.

But it's not just jewelry owners cashing in on gold's glow-up. Institutional investors and even central banks are stockpiling gold right now. 

“Trade policies from the U.S. administration, they have generated uncertainty,” said Juan Carlos Artigas, who heads research at the World Gold Council. 

The Trump administration's tariff policies will likely raise prices — pushing inflation up — and that makes putting money into savings risky, because it could lose value sitting there (to say nothing of locking those dollars away for 10 years in a U.S. government bond.) 

At the same time, volatile markets mean buying stocks right now is more of a gamble than usual. So where's an investor to turn? 

“Gold has been a safe haven for centuries,” explained Artigas. “We estimate there's more than $250 billion traded in gold every day.”

Right now, investors are going back to the future: guarding themselves against the ups and downs of policy whims, tariffs and global markets by stashing their cash in an asset used by pharaohs and silk road traders thousands of years ago.

Meanwhile, at Global Gold and silver, all of Oshri Reuven’s containers full of jewelry got me thinking about some of the orphaned earrings I have collecting dust in my jewelry box. I asked him how much one of the little gold hoops in his pile might be worth — you know, for journalism. 

He weighed it carefully.

“So this is about one gram of 14-karat gold … That's about $60,” he said.

Enough for a burger and a couple of strong cocktails at the end of a very long week. Solid gold in my book!