Fed Likely to Hold Rates in 2025
Gold has benefited from geopolitical uncertainty and central bank demand, but a prolonged period of restrictive Fed policy presents risks.
Source – FXEMPIRE
“The next phase of getting (Zonia) into production is a bankable feasibility study so you can fund it. A bankable feasibility study is going to cost $5 million to $7 million, and we don’t have that right now,” Neal said.
“The plan is to get it there, but we’re going to need partners to help us get it there. So that’s why (we’re doing) the strategic review, and it looks like we’ll have an announcement in the next few weeks on one of these opportunities.”
Source – Investing News Network (full interview video with CEO Gord Neal)
Gold prices rallied on Tuesday, regaining ground after a slight pullback at the start of March. Spot gold was up 0.4%, reaching $2,900.78 an ounce as of 7:30 AM UTC. The rally was supported by a weakening US dollar spot index that has dropped to 103.5, a 24-hour 0.2% downtick.
Gold’s more “resilient” performance against the dollar is giving investors more incentives to turn against Bitcoin, with its price falling by more than $15,400 over the past month.
“Now that Bitcoin fell below $77K, it’s down 30% from its January record high,” Schiff posted on X. “It’s hard to see the rationale for the U.S. government holding Bitcoin as a reserve asset when it can lose that much market value so quickly. The rationale will be even harder to see when it’s down 50%.”
Source – Cryptopolitan

Source – MSN
Sub-Saharan African central banks that have added gold to their reserves in recent years could face price and liquidity crises if the value of the precious metal slides, BMI, a unit of Fitch Group, said on Wednesday.
Ghana, Tanzania and Nigeria have been buying gold domestically to beef up their reserves, BMI said, a move accelerated by this year’s broader market volatility stoked by U.S. trade tariffs and other geopolitical risks.
Policymakers in Kenya and Uganda are exploring a move into gold, Rwanda and Namibia have taken active steps towards adding the metal into their reserves.
Governments could also struggle to convert their gold holdings into liquid assets like hard currencies, Gard said, pointing to India and Argentina when they faced acute balance of payments challenges in the 1990s and 2000s, respectively.
Source – Reuters
On January 7, 2025, A-Mark Precious Metals, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMRK) stock closed at $27.50 per share with a market capitalization of $637.563 million.
“As a long-biased fund, we prefer to own various countercyclical companies to lower the risk of our portfolio. At the beginning of the year, we identified a pawn store operator and a wholesaler / retailer of precious metals called A-Mark Precious Metals, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMRK) as interesting long-term opportunities that simultaneously provided a hedging function to our portfolio. We have exited our position in AMRK during the year. We believed that economic uncertainty and higher precious metals prices would spark renewed consumer demand for physical gold and silver coins. This demand did not materialize and we therefore saw no immediate catalyst in AMRK.” stated Night Watch Investment Management in its Q4 2024 investor letter
Source – Insider Monkey
Zinc, the biggest loser in the LME complex, is currently trading 4.8% lower than at the start of the year.
Meanwhile, tin prices have increased by 13.5% in the first few weeks of the year, making it the biggest winner.
Copper refining grew as expected at 4.2%, but mine production surprised at 2.3%, 0.5% higher than the ICSG September forecast.
The supply of refined copper is under threat due to mine production, which has put downward pressure on processing fees in copper smelters, according to Commerzbank.
The lead market experienced a minor oversupply due to a substantial increase in mine production.
This increase, just under 2%, was fueled by significantly higher supply in the US, Australia, Peru, and Mexico.
Source – Invezz