Trump's Tariffs Crash Sees Gold -0.8% for Week, Silver -10% with Stocks, Copper, Oil
Friday, 4/04/2025 15:41
The PRICE of GOLD fell today to what was a new US Dollar record on Friday last week as the crash in global stock markets continued along with crude oil, copper, silver and the PGMs after China retaliated against President Trump's 'reciprocal' tariffs with heavy import duties on US goods.
"The markets are going to boom, stocks are going to boom, the country is going to boom," said a defiant Trump late Thursday as US tech stocks made their worst 1-day plunge since summer 2020's Covid Crisis.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq then opened Friday 3.3% lower again, plunging to 11-month lows and pulling rich-world equities as a group 6.2% below last week's finish on the MSCI World Index.
That marks the steepest fall since the mid-March 2020
crash phase of the Covid Crisis.
US economic growth so far in 2025 was already on track for an annualized 0.8% drop according to the Atlanta Fed's latest GDPNow update, adjusted for the surge of gold bullion imports spurred by fears of trade tariffs hitting precious metals.
With
bullion in fact exempt from the White House's "Liberation Day" trade tariffs this week, "We will now get to see just how much the [New York-London] dislocation was driving price action," says strategist Nicky Shiels at Swiss bullion refiners and finance group MKS Pamp.
If inflated levels for switching New York futures into physical bullion really were "the tail wagging gold prices," Shiels says, that is "essentially a $600 premium" driven by EFP contracts, because gold was trading at $2600 when Trump first threatened tariffs in November 2024, "triggering" an avalanche of shipments from global trading-and-storage hub London as well as from other major centres into Comex-approved US warehouses.
The price gap between London spot gold prices and New York's Comex June futures contract fell below $10 per Troy ounce around the precious metal's 3pm UK benchmarking auction on Friday.
The lease rate for 1-month gold meantime fell from 0.60% to 0.37% per annum, retreating to pre-Trump election levels.
Silver's
NYLON price gap shrank harder, effectively crashing to zero at just 3 cents per ounce – and down from $1 ahead of Wednesday's trade tariffs announcement from the Trump White House – while London lease rates to borrow silver for 1 month sank from 6.80% per year to barely 3.00%.
"Thursday's price action was also instructive," Shiels says, noting the "massive $110 gold and $2.20 silver high-low wipeout but equally stunning gold recovery" in yesterday's late US trade.
"[While] unofficial gold buyers (whether its central-bank or sovereign-wealth related) are aggressively on the bid to backstop price falls, [that's] clearly not evident in silver.
"Thus the white metals are more at risk" of dropping further than gold as the NYLON dislocations – which have pulled well over 4 years' worth of total US gold demand into Comex storage – are unwound.
With Comex May futures trading less $20 above London bullion, gold today fell to its lowest Dollar price since last Friday's Asian opening, sinking to $3050 per Troy ounce to fix 0.8% beneath its 3pm London benchmarking auction 5 sessions ago.
Palladium meantime hit 5-week lows in Dollar terms at $915 per Troy ounce, while sister-metal platinum – also finding its largest single use in autocatalysts to reduce harmful emissions from fossil-fuel engines – erased the last of 2025's previous 8.5% gain at $931.
Industrially-useful silver meantime dropped to 9-week lows at $30.40 per Troy ounce, marking a crash back to
Great Depression-era lows when priced against gold, with the 'safe haven' metal's ratio over silver prices hitting its highest since the Covid Crash of 5 years ago at 100.
Making its worst weekly crash in Dollar terms since October 2022 at 8.9%, the price of silver made its worst 5-session loss in UK Pounds and Euros since September 2020 at 9.5% and 11.0% respectively.
Industrially-vital copper meantime sank 10.2% from last weekend against the fast-falling Dollar – itself down 2.0% for the week on the currency markets, albeit rallying hard on Thursday and Friday – while crude oil lost 10.9% per barrel of European benchmark Brent.
"The US move not only harms the interests of the United States itself," said China's Customs Tariff Commission of the State Council this morning, matching Wednesday's additional 34% US tariffs on Chinese goods, "but also jeopardizes global economic development and the stability of industrial and supply chains."
"Europe braces for flood of Chinese goods after US tariffs," says the
Financial Times.
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