An 'unbound hyperbolic trajectory' and the arrival of aliens and 'credit cockroaches'
The precious metals markets are telling you the dollar as a unit of account for global trade is not just in dire straits, but it may be terminal at an accelerating rate. It is losing value quickly.
Friday, October 17th, 2025
Laramie, Wyoming
By Dan Denning
‘Well for one thing, it has what the eggheads are calling an unbound hyperbolic trajectory,’ I said.
‘I AM an egghead and trust me…that doesn’t mean what you think it means,’ my friend said.
‘Shut up and listen. I checked this with AI. The second thing is that it has a huge amount of carbon dioxide, which apparently is also unusual. And finally, it has a LOT more nickel in its emissions than iron. All of those are not your normal comet things.
‘So what?’
‘So it’s definitely aliens.’
That was me teasing a friend about 3I/Atlas, the interstellar object currently streaking through our solar system that I mentioned a few weeks ago. My friend is an astrophysicist. And he assures me it’s just a comet. He did allow that comets are mostly rocks and ice. The presence of so much nickel in greater proportion to iron IS unusual, he conceded.
But it was the term ‘unbound hyperbolic trajectory’ that caught my attention this week. With respect to the comet/alien spaceship, it means the object is travelling so fast (137,000 miles per hour) that it’s not coming into our solar system in an elliptical orbit. And it’s coming in so fast it won’t be captured by the gravity of a large planet (Jupiter) or of a star (our sun).
In other words, it’s behaving like the gold price since August. Rather than a cyclical phenomenon (like Haley’s comet, which comes around every 76 years and will be back in our neighborhood in 2061), this gold rally feels…hyperbolic. Not unbound. But breaking the bonds with the world’s major unit of account, the US dollar itself. This is..well…an astronomically important idea…that this is not your normal cycle. It’s something bigger and different. And it’s the main subject of this week’s note.
For context, see the chart above. So far, the move in gold actually IS part of what happens in a normal bull market. The gold line in the middle was the blow-off phase in the early 1980s. You can watch Jim Simons of Renaissance Technologies (the most successful quant hedge fund of all time) talk about trading that market here. The video is four and half minutes long.
Back to the present. It’s not every day, or every life time, that you see a life-changing event happen. The arrival of an alien spaceship would certainly qualify as such an event. That’s not what I’m talking about in today’s note, however. What I’m talking about is the very real possibility that the precious metals markets are telling you the dollar as a unit of account for global trade is not just in dire straits, but it may be terminal at an accelerating rate. It is losing value relative to other, scarcer, realer things.
Stocks may be telling you the same thing, by the way. I’ve mentioned before that measured in local currency (the Reichsmark) German stocks started going hyperbolic in the latter stages of the Weimar Hyperinflation (around 1923 and 1924). In gold and US dollar terms at the time (the US dollar was still backed by gold) the total returns were flat. But measured in a dying currency, all prices went to the moon, which is in the general direction of heaven.
To be honest, the death of a currency–especially the world’s reserve currency–is not an event you want to bear witness to in your life if you can avoid it. But if you’re using gold as financial catastrophe insurance and the catastrophe arrives, at least you’re insured as much as you can hope to be. So what next? Higher gold prices or imminent catastrophe?