Barry Eichengreen

Barry Eichengreen is a Distinguished Professor of Economics and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the world's leading economic historians of the international monetary system. Gold and mining investors should care because he studies, with hard data, the single largest new source of gold demand in recent years: central bank purchases. He does not pick mining stocks — his contribution is the monetary and geopolitical picture underneath the gold price, including the reserve currency role of the US dollar (the currency foreign governments hold as their savings).

His track record runs through the standard references on money and gold. His 1992 book Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919–1939 made the case that clinging to gold deepened the Great Depression, and it remains the classic account of why countries that left gold recovered first. Globalizing Capital (1996) traced the full history of the international monetary system. Exorbitant Privilege (2011), shortlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year award, argued that the dollar's special status — the cheap credit and monetary influence the United States gets because the world holds dollars — would erode gradually into a system with several major currencies, not collapse in a sudden crash. He has taught at Berkeley since 1987 and holds the Pardee Chair there.

His method is monetary history applied to present questions: study how reserve assets actually behave across past regimes, then let that record discipline the forecast. With Serkan Arslanalp and Chima Simpson-Bell, he wrote "Gold as International Reserves: A Barbarous Relic No More?" (IMF Working Paper, 2023; later in the Journal of International Economics), which documents why central banks — especially those facing sanctions risk after Russia's 2022 reserve freeze — are adding gold as a store of value no foreign government can freeze. He reads today's de-dollarization talk (efforts to reduce reliance on the dollar in trade and reserves) as slow erosion of the dollar's share, not its replacement by one successor.

An investor who follows him gets the demand side of the gold equation from its most documented source. He continues to publish on central bank gold buying, sanctions, and currency competition through his regular Project Syndicate column and his 2026 book Money Beyond Borders: Global Currencies from Croesus to Crypto. For mining investors, his work addresses the question that moves gold equities — why official-sector buying persists, and what would make it stop — better than most equity research.