Five thousand dollars lands in your bank account.

New tires? A vacation? Wipe out the credit-card balance?

Or maybe you walk into a coin shop and buy an ounce of gold.

Last Tuesday, President Trump stood before the Republican Party’s midterm convention in Dallas and made a promise:

“We will pay every adult citizen a $5,000 dividend.”

There was a catch, of course. Republicans have to retain control of the House and Senate in November.

Trump calls it the “Trump Dividend.” And with roughly 240 million adult U.S. citizens, the price tag would be around $1.2 trillion.

Exactly where that money would come from is unsettled.

Trump says Washington can afford it and has pointed to tariff revenue as a possible source of funding. He also says the money would have to be spent in the United States.

House Speaker Mike Johnson says Congress would have to approve the payments.

In other words, don’t spend your $5,000 yet.

But Jim Rickards is already thinking about what those checks could do to the dollars already in your pocket.

Your Rundown for Wednesday, September 16, 2026...

The $1,200 Inflation Lesson

There’s a useful precedent for Trump’s $5,000 proposal.

In April 2020, the first COVID stimulus checks began landing in Americans’ bank accounts. For millions of people, the check was written for $1,200.

At the time, businesses had been ordered closed, unemployment was soaring and the economy had effectively hit a wall.

But the checks didn’t stop at $1,200. Congress ultimately authorized several trillion dollars in pandemic relief.

Then came inflation.

By June 2022, consumer prices were rising at an annual rate of 9.1%, the hottest reading since November 1981.

The stimulus checks weren’t solely responsible. COVID disrupted factories and supply chains around the world. Energy prices climbed. Labor markets were scrambled. The Fed kept monetary policy extraordinarily loose.

But all that government spending mattered too.

New York Fed researchers later found that government stimulus accounted for half or more of the inflationary pressure from increased spending through June 2022.

Now consider what happened to that original $1,200 when measured against precious metals.

On April 15, 2020, gold closed at $1,727.20 per ounce. Silver closed at $15.45.

At spot prices, $1,200 would have bought about 0.70 ounce of gold or roughly 77 ounces of silver.

On Monday, Sept. 14, gold closed at $4,333.77. That 0.70 ounce would now be worth just over $3,000.

Silver is even more remarkable.

Those 77 ounces purchased for roughly $1,200 in April 2020 would be worth more than $4,900 today.

Now put Trump’s proposed $5,000 dividend against the same yardstick.

At Monday’s closing price, $5,000 would buy about 1.15 ounces of gold or 78 ounces of silver.

In other words, $1,200 bought about 77 ounces of silver in April 2020. Today, it takes around $5,000 to buy 78 ounces.

That doesn’t mean consumer prices have quadrupled since 2020. They haven’t.

Nor does it mean inflation alone explains silver’s rise. Industrial demand, investment flows, mine supply and monetary conditions all affect the price of silver.

But it does illustrate something Jim Rickards has been warning about for years: Dollars, no longer tied to gold, are a measuring stick whose value is unnecessarily fluid. The number printed on the bill stays the same. What it buys does not.

And Jim sees an obvious danger in handing Americans another, much larger round of checks.

“One thing we can be sure of is that [Trump’s] plan would be highly inflationary,” Jim writes in this week’s Strategic Intelligence.

Whether Trump’s $5,000 checks ever arrive is another question. The proposal would first have to clear significant political and legislative hurdles.

But if a “dividend” check does land in your bank account, Jim has already suggested one possible destination.

He recommends increasing allocations to real property, gold, silver and natural resources as protection against inflation.

The government sent Americans $1,200 in 2020.

Six years later, Trump is talking about $5,000.

Measured in silver, they’re practically the same check.

And that’s one way to measure what’s happened to the dollar since 2020.

Market Rundown for Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2026

S&P 500 futures are up 0.35% to 7,680.

Oil is down 1.80% to $103.88 for a barrel of WTI.

Gold is up 1.15% to $4,382 per ounce.

And Bitcoin’s down 0.15% to $75,845.