HSBC raised its 2025 average gold price forecast to $3,215 an ounce from $3,015 and its 2026 forecast to $3,125 from $2,915, citing elevated risks and government debt.
“We anticipate a wide and volatile trading range of $3,600-3,100/oz for the rest of the year and year-end prices of $3,175/oz for 2025 and $3,025/oz for 2026,” the bank said in a note on Tuesday.
Source – Reuters
HSBC – is a British universal bank and financial services group headquartered in London, England.
The most active futures on gold are currently trading at $2745.10, up $27.30 or 1% from a day earlier. That level is just about 2% shy of its all-time settlement high of $2800.80 marked on Oct. 30. If the contract closes at current levels, it would be the highest close since last month, according to the Dow Jones Market Data.
“Gold remains the consummate hedge for investors worried about inflation or growth,” wrote Jared Woodard and the team from BofA securities on Tuesday. Gold was labeled as BofA’s “highest conviction investment ideas for 2025.”
Source – BARRON’S
BofA securities – Bank of America Inc., previously Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BAML) is an American multinational investment banking division under the auspices of Bank of America.
A 12% y/y drop in Q4 gold jewellery consumption to 547t- took the annual total down to 1,877t, down 11%, as unrelenting gold price strength impacted consumers’ ability to buy, the World Gold Council (WGC) said in a report on Wednesday.
For 2025, the WGC said central banks and “ETF investors likely to drive demand with economic uncertainty supporting gold’s role as a risk hedge, but on the flipside, keeping pressure on jewellery.”
Source – Seeking Alpha
“Current inflation measures, such as consumer price index (CPI) and producer price index (PPI), are significantly lower than previous 40-year highs. However, they remain ‘stubborn’ or ‘sticky,’ resisting a return to the central bank’s preferred 2% target,” Fidelity Digital Assets research director Chris Kuiper wrote in a report that asked: “Why is no one talking about stagflation?”—defined as a combination of low economic growth and persistently high inflation.
Source – Forbes
“We are breaking a fundamental bottleneck of traditional materials like copper,” said Asir Intisar Khan, who received his doctorate from Stanford and is now a visiting postdoctoral scholar and first author on the paper. “Our niobium phosphide conductors show that it’s possible to send faster, more efficient signals through ultrathin wires. This could improve the energy efficiency of future chips, and even small gains add up when many chips are used, such as in the massive data centers that store and process information today.”
Source – SciTechDaily
This move facilitates the company’s reinstatement of its securities to official quotation, following a consolidation of its issued capital and the settlement of various creditor liabilities.
These financial maneuvers are expected to strengthen True North’s operational foundation and strategic positioning in the mining sector.
Source – Tip Ranks
“We believe that he’s using (auto tariffs) as a trade negotiation. The markets are jittery because nobody really knows what’s going to happen and what will come out in future,” Nicolas Lin, chairman and interim CEO of Aether Holdings.
European stocks fell, with weakness in shares of Europe’s top carmakers such as Volkswagen down nearly 2%, while BMW lost almost 3% and Mercedes-Benz slid more than 4%.
The dollar index, which measures the greenback against a basket of currencies, fell 0.2% to 104.43, with the euro up 0.24% at $1.0777.
The Mexican peso weakened 0.82% versus the dollar at 20.288 while the Canadian dollar weakened 0.39% versus the greenback to C$1.43 per dollar as both countries are expected to be heavily impacted by the tariffs.
Source – Reuters
U.S. President Donald Trump sprang a double surprise on the copper market when he announced import tariffs of 50% effective next month.
The August 1 start date signals the end of the race to ship physical metal to the United States to capture the tariff arbitrage.
A lucky few with cargoes already afloat may yet cross the finishing line in time, but the physical tariff trade is rapidly unwinding.
The LME benchmark spread is now in a comfortable contango of $66 per ton, compared with a backwardation of more than $300 per ton at the end of June.
Source – Reuters
Saudi Arabia’s Manara Minerals is looking for critical minerals projects in Zambia to invest in, the southern African country’s mines minister Paul Kabuswe told Reuters on Thursday.
“They (Manara) are interested, but we do not know which ones yet,” he said on the sidelines of a mining conference in Riyadh, adding that an announcement on a potential mining deal between Zambia and Saudi Arabia is likely this year.
“We no longer want those agreements where we have 10% or 15%,” he said, adding that the government is also holding talks with Barrick Gold, Ivanhoe Mines and Chinese investors on their plans for new projects.
Source – Reuters