NEW YORK — At Jackson Hole last week, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said almost nothing about gold — and gave gold bulls precisely the signal they needed. The absence of a hawkish surprise, the absence of any indication that the Fed’s next move might be a rate hike rather than a pause, and the deliberately calibrated message that emerged from Wyoming: all of it translated into a weaker dollar and a firmer gold market that carried Comex spot prices to $3,527 per troy ounce on August 31.
Gold at $3,527 is not the all-time record. That was set earlier in 2026, briefly above $3,600. But $3,527 with a narrowing basis into December futures and Goldman Sachs maintaining its $4,900 year-end target without revision is something more specific: a price floor that a growing share of market participants is treating as structural support rather than a temporary ceiling.
| Benchmark | Price (USD) | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Comex Spot Gold | $3,527/oz | â–² $12 (+0.34%) |
| Comex December Futures | $3,549/oz | â–² $11 (+0.31%) |
| Goldman Sachs Year-End Target | $4,900/oz | — |
| JPMorgan 12-Month Target | $4,000/oz | — |
| Bank of America 2026 Forecast | $3,500–$4,000/oz | — |
The Jackson Hole speech was the week’s operative event, and what Powell did not say was the operative text. No hint of a September cut. No recalibration of the restrictive posture. No pivot language. The DXY dollar index eased after the speech, and when the dollar weakens, commodities priced in dollars — oil, copper, and above all gold — move in the opposite direction. The relationship is not mechanical, but it is real enough that CME Group futures positioning data showed a net-long increase in gold contracts in the session following Jackson Hole.
Goldman Sachs has been the most publicly aggressive bull on gold among the major banks. Its commodity desk raised the year-end target to $4,900 earlier in 2026 and has maintained it through three successive review cycles. The rationale rests on three pillars: first, central bank buying that shows no sign of reversal, with emerging-market reserve managers continuing to shift holdings away from dollar-denominated assets; second, retail demand in India and China that has not corrected meaningfully despite record prices — the elasticity that economists expected at $3,000 simply did not materialize; and third, ongoing geopolitical uncertainty that maintains a structural bid for non-correlated stores of value. At $3,527, the gap between the current price and Goldman’s target is large enough to seem implausible — until you remember that $3,000 seemed implausible eighteen months ago. It happened.
Not everyone is running Goldman’s model. JPMorgan’s commodities team carries a 12-month target of $4,000 — bullish by conventional standards but 23% below Goldman’s number. Bank of America’s 2026 forecast range of $3,500 to $4,000 essentially brackets today’s price at its lower bound. The disagreement between the banks is not about direction; all three are bullish. It is about magnitude and timing.
The World Gold Council’s mid-2026 demand data complicates the narrative somewhat. Central bank buying has been the dominant structural driver, but Q2 data showed the first sequential softening in central bank gold purchases since 2022 — still positive, still significant, but decelerating. If that deceleration continues in Q3, the single strongest pillar under Goldman’s $4,900 target gets thinner. The WGC data does not contradict the bullish case; it introduces a question mark where there was previously only upward momentum.
The Federal Reserve’s posture is the hinge on which the near-term price hangs. A September hold was priced in before Jackson Hole. What Jackson Hole did was remove the tail risk of a hawkish surprise — and that tail-risk removal was worth real basis points in gold. The next meaningful Fed decision point is the September FOMC meeting. If the data between now and then — payrolls, CPI, PCE — comes in soft enough to reignite rate-cut expectations, dollar weakness could accelerate and gold could test its all-time record before year-end. If the data comes in stronger than expected, the hold continues and gold treads water above $3,500, which is itself a demonstration of structural support.
For Indian buyers tracking Comex as an input into domestic gold decisions, today’s $3,527 per ounce translates — at an exchange rate of approximately ₹84 per dollar — to a raw material cost of roughly ₹14,880 per gram before Indian import duties, IBJA margin, and local levies. The spread between that raw cost and the retail price in most Indian cities on August 31 is the combined weight of import tariffs, making charges, and wholesale markup — a structure that makes Indian gold consistently more expensive than the Comex equivalent on a per-gram basis. For a city-by-city breakdown of August 31 Indian gold rates, see the India Gold Price Today master report.
What the Jackson Hole silence confirmed for the gold market is that the path of least resistance for prices remains upward as long as the Fed is on hold, the dollar is soft, and central banks are buying. None of those three conditions has changed heading into September.
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