One of Wall Street’s most feared hedge fund managers on the decline of the dollar: Gold is ‘becoming the reserve asset’

Gold blasted past $5,300 per ounce last month as President Donald Trump’s hawkish foreign policy and tariff threats sent investors to safer assets. At the same time, U.S. deficit spending swelled to what the Congressional Budget Office called an unsustainable $1.9 trillion, a scenario that’s chipping away at the dollar’s standing as the world’s leading reserve currency.

The confluence of these factors has some investors predicting the fall of Treasury securities as the only true global reserve. Greenlight Capital founder David Einhorn made that apparent in a recent conversation with CNBC. The investing legend forecasts a monumental shift in global reserve assets, predicting that central banks will swap dollars for the yellow metal.

“The central banks around the world are buying gold,” Einhorn said. “Whereas a few years ago, it was mostly Treasuries.” He added that it is “becoming the reserve asset” because U.S. trade policy “is very unstable, and it’s causing other countries to say, ‘We want to settle our trade in something other than U.S. dollars.’”

To be sure, the dollar still dominates as the reserve currency of choice. While in the first half of last year, central banks dumped over $48 billion in Treasuries, in July 2025, the dollar still composed roughly a 58% share of all foreign exchange res...