Cash after inflation
This condition measures what your cash earns while you wait, once inflation has taken its cut. Economists call it the real rate. When cash pays a lot after inflation, holding gold means giving up that yield. When cash pays little or nothing after inflation, gold is cheaper to hold by comparison.
- Share of the score
- 25%
- Share used today
- 27.8%
- Source
- Fed H.15, inflation-adjusted 10-year yield
- How often it updates
- daily
- Date of the newest figure
- 2026-09-17
- Newest figure
- 2.61 %
- How fresh it is
- Up to date. The newest figure is 3 days old, and we stop counting this part once it passes 7 days. An old figure left counting would quietly drag the score toward whatever was true last month.
- How strong the evidence is
- strong, though the link failed from 2022 to 2024, and we show that failure
What we look at
We use the yield on inflation-adjusted 10-year US government bonds (called TIPS). The Federal Reserve publishes this yield every day, in its H.15 release. For the years before TIPS existed, we use a stand-in. It is the plain 10-year government bond yield minus the yearly change in consumer prices (CPI).
Why it matters if you're buying gold
Money left in a savings account grows a little each year. Gold does not. A gold coin is the same coin next year, and it pays you nothing for waiting. So every buyer faces one question: what am I giving up? When savings genuinely grow, after rising prices have taken their cut, choosing gold costs you that growth. Fewer people choose it. When savings quietly lose value instead, choosing gold costs you almost nothing. More people choose it. For two decades up to 2021 those two lines moved in opposite directions, closely enough to be useful. Then the regime changed: the link broke between 2022 and 2024. We show you by how much, further down this page, rather than quietly dropping it.
What this cannot tell you
Strong, with one big exception. The link broke down between 2022 and 2024. We keep this condition in the score because the mechanism makes sense in plain economic terms. Two decades of results outweigh a short break, and we publish the numbers on that break in full.
Today's reading in plain words
Today this condition reads 37/100, below the historical middle.
Notes: Lower cash yields after inflation have historically preceded better long-term gold returns. The 2022 to 2024 break is spelled out on this page.
How the score is worked out
We rank today's yield, averaged over a few days to cut the noise, against every reading in its own past. The rank runs from 0 to 100. Lower yields get higher scores. Low yields have historically been better conditions for a long-term gold buyer. The direction is set by economic logic, not by fitting to gold's price.
Which way it points. Lower or falling cash yield after inflation lifts the score. Higher yields lower it.
What the evidence says
- Erb and Harvey report a -0.82 correlation between 10-year TIPS yields and the inflation-adjusted gold price from 1997 to 2012. The finding sits in NBER Working Paper 18706 (2013), later in Financial Analysts Journal 69(4). The authors add two cautions. The link weakens to -0.31 on longer UK data. Correlation does not prove cause.
- The Chicago Fed Letter 464 (2021) shows the link between these two lines was essentially absent before 2001. It strengthens after 2001. It broke down again between 2022 and 2024.
- Two banks have put numbers on how tight the link has been over time. RBC Wealth Management measures the fit at 69% between 1997 and 2004. It rose to 84% between 2005 and 2021. It collapsed to 3% in 2022 to 2023, and 7% in 2024. JP Morgan Asset Management reports a similar drop, from about 85% (1990 to 2021) to about 16% since 2022. The direction of the effect even flipped.
- Our own test since 1971 tells a similar story with monthly data. We compared this score against what gold did over the next 12 months. The link has never been reliably positive across a full era, and it turned sharply negative after 2022. The era-by-era figures, kept current with every regeneration, are on the history page. Read plainly: this score did not reliably predict 12-month gold returns even before 2022.
If you are selling
If you are selling, falling cash yields after inflation are a reason to hold, not a reason to sell. Rising yields weaken the case to buy. They do not automatically become a reason to sell if you do not need the cash.
Source: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (US), H.15. See the methodology page for the full formula, and the provenance page for where each number comes from and how fresh it is.