Gold Down, Silver Firm as Trump Sends Copper 5% Higher, Euro Hits 4-Month USD Highs
Thursday, 3/06/2025 14:26
GOLD PRICES fell but silver held onto yesterday's gains in London trade Thursday as the new US Trump administration spurred fresh volatility in industrial commodities while rich-world government bond prices extended this week's slump and Western stock markets fell back from yesterday's German 'debt explosion' surge.
Frankfurt's Dax index edged another 0.5% higher after leaping 3.4% on Wednesday's
big borrowing and spending plans from likely German chancellor Friedrich Merz.
But the region's wider EuroStoxx 600 index lost 0.5% to trade lower for the week so far – down 1.8% from Monday's all-time record high – as the Euro currency hit new 4-month highs against the US Dollar despite the European Central Bank today cutting the 20-nation bloc's interest rates as widely expected.
That saw gold priced in Euros hit €2676 per Troy ounce, down 1.6% from last weekend, while the UK gold price in Pounds per ounce also dropped to 5-week lows, trading at £2550.
US gold futures have now risen 10.4% so far in 2025 in Dollar terms. The Euro has meantime risen 4.5% against the greenback.
"[Europe's] economy faces continued challenges," said the ECB as it cut interest rates and also its GDP forecasts on Thursday, making "downward revisions for 2025 and 2026 [to] reflect lower exports and ongoing weakness in investment, in part originating from high trade policy uncertainty as well as broader policy uncertainty."
With gold priced in the fast-falling Dollar briefly dipping through $2900 per ounce, the price of
industrially-useful silver slipped 25 cents from last night's 1-week high of $32.75 – a 12-year high when reached last October.
US copper futures contracts meantime leapt over 5.0% to hit 3-week highs, extending their rally since
Donald Trump included the as-yet untariffed base metal in a list of commodities subject to 25% import duty in his "America is back" speech to Congress on Tuesday.
Aluminium prices rallied towards mid-February's 9-month highs – hit after Trump imposed 25% tariffs on all US imports of the metal – while Chinese steel prices today neared 1-month highs in Yuan terms on rumours that Beijing's dictatorship wants to cut overcapacity in the sector, now also hit with 25% US trade tariffs.
Brent crude steadied below $70 per barrel, near its cheapest since November 2021 after data from the Energy Information Administration said US crude oil stockpiles rose more than analysts expected last week.
Output from members of the Opec+ group of oil-producer nations meantime rose in February, led by Iran,
Reuters reports, despite the cartel agreeing to cap production until April because of weak global demand and rising non-Opec output.
Iranian oil tankers at sea will be stopped and inspected by the US Navy, the newswire adds separately, under Trump's plans to apply "maximum pressure" against the Islamic dictatorship's nuclear weapons program.
Ahead of Friday's
monthly non-farm payrolls report on US jobs and wages, layoffs announced by US employers more than tripled last month to the most since July 2020 – depths of the first-wave Covid Crisis – data from redundancy services firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said today.
The job losses were led by federal government cuts and the cancellation of private-sector contracts over fears of a global trade war.
On top of 80,000 jobs cuts planned for the Department of Veterans Affairs – taking it back to 2019's staffing level of 400,000 – the new US Government also wants to halve the tax-collecting IRS's headcount to 45,000, says the Associated Press.
That would render the IRS "dysfunctional" according to one former commissioner.
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