Gold Price in the 2010s

The decade opened in full crisis-hedge mode. Quantitative easing and the European sovereign debt crisis drove the average from $1,225 in 2010 to $1,572 in 2011, the year gold spiked to $1,921 per ounce on September 6 amid the first-ever US credit rating downgrade. 2012 posted the decade's highest annual average at $1,669 even as momentum faded.

Then the bull market broke. When the Federal Reserve signaled in 2013 that it would taper its bond purchases, gold suffered its worst annual fall of the era, down 15.5 percent to a $1,411 average, with a historic two-day crash that April. The slide continued to $1,266 in 2014 and a decade-low $1,160 average in 2015, the year the Fed finally began raising rates. Recovery came slowly: the Brexit vote lifted 2016 to $1,251, averages then went sideways for two years, and only the Fed's 2019 pivot back to rate cuts pushed gold to a $1,393 average heading into the 2020s.

One phrase: the taper tantrum. After years of quantitative easing had underwritten the gold trade, the Fed's signal that bond buying would wind down sent real yields sharply higher and the dollar with them. ETF holdings that had accumulated through the crisis years reversed into heavy outflows, and in mid-April 2013 gold fell more in two trading days than it had in any comparable stretch for three decades.

The crash reset the market for half a decade. With US stocks compounding and inflation quiet, gold spent 2014 through 2018 without a trend, and the $1,921 record of 2011 stood untouched until the pandemic era finally broke it in 2020. That next chapter is covered in gold in the 2020s; the real-terms view of the whole cycle is on the inflation-adjusted gold price page.