GOLD PRICES leapt again overnight before plunging $100 per ounce from a fresh spot-market high on Friday but setting the 10th new London benchmark record in 13 sessions so far this month.

Adding $100 in 6 hours during Asian trade, gold peaked at $4379 per Troy ounce and then fixed at today's 10:30am London benchmarking auction around $4334 per Troy ounce, almost $110 higher from Thursday morning's fix.

The 'safe haven' precious metal, which has now set 48 new daily highs in 2025 − the most since the full-year record of 54 set in 1979 − then sank to $4280 as London's 3pm auction approached.

"Central banks are still buying record amounts of gold, and private investors are simply catching up as the Fed cuts rates," says Lina Thomas, commodities strategist at the research arm of US investment bank Goldman Sachs.

"So after years of under-allocation, this is more normalization than mania."

"Unlike previous rallies," says global bank and London bullion market clearer HSBC − today joining Goldman Sachs, US finance giant Bank of America and France's Societe Generale in forecasting gold prices will hit $5000 per ounce in 2026 − "we believe many of these new buyers are likely stay in the gold space, even after the rally ends, not so much for appreciation necessarily as for gold’s diversification and ‘safe haven’ qualities."

Meantime, and following gold's surge since US investment bank Morgan Stanley told investors to hike their gold allocations, "This market is absolutely relentless," says the precious metals team at Japanese conglomerate Mitsubishi, "with dips aggressively bought, suggesting the underlying bullish sentiment remains very high conviction."

Rising 8.2% since last Friday evening, the Dollar price of gold hasn't made a sharper weekly jump since December 2008, when global stock markets crashed towards 13-year lows amid the chaos following Lehman Brothers' collapse.

The past 5 sessions' gain was beaten by only 22 of the prior 3,001 weeks since Western central banks, led by the US Fed, stopped trying to defend the Dollar's then-official 'Gold Standard' price of $35 per ounce in April 1968.

Rising 6% for the 4th week running, meantime, silver also retreated on Friday but recorded its 6th new all-time price high in a row in London trading, fixing just shy of $54 per Troy ounce at London's midday auction.

The price of silver has now added 86.6% in 2025 so far, four times the pace of last year's rise.

Gold has gained 66.0%, also its strongest price rise since 1979.

That year saw gold and silver surge amid double-digit inflation, plunging Western bond prices, the Iranian Revolution and then US hostage crisis before peaking the next January after the invasion of Afghanistan by Soviet Russia.

With Russia, Iran and also China accused Thursday by the UK's domestic intelligence service MI5 of "descending into ugly methods [we are] more used to seeing in our terrorism casework," US President Trump yesterday back-tracked from selling Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine after a 2-hour phonecall with invading Russia's President Putin.

Trump will now meet Putin in Budapest within the next 2 weeks.

China's Ministry of Commerce meantime accused Trump of "deliberately creating unnecessary misunderstanding and panic" around rare earth elements (REE) in what he now terms a "trade war" between the world's 2 largest economies.

Gold has only made a 1-day move of $100 per ounce or more 10 times before, 4 of them in spring 2025 following US President Trump's 'Liberation Day' trade tariffs shock.

Global stock markets fell Friday but Wall Street opened highs after the sudden US bankruptcies of auto parts supplier First Brands and car dealership Tricolor.