The GOLD PRICE peaked within $15 of $4000 per Troy ounce Tuesday in London, marking the 2nd anniversary of Hamas' October 7th attack on Israel with its 40th new London benchmark high of this year to date as Goldman Sachs hiked its 2026 forecast towards $5000 and the People's Bank of China said it continued buying the precious metal last month.

Silver meantime reversed most of yesterday's 1.6% rise, while New York gold futures topped $4000 per ounce for the second time in 2 days.

"Citadel's [Ken] Griffin Calls Rush to Gold as Safer Asset 'Concerning'," says a headline at Bloomberg, quoting the $62 billion hedge fund's founder "warning" against the speed and sudden investment popularity of gold's ascent.

"Gold's 2025 surge has even Wall Street worried," says QZ.com, citing only that same single interview.

With the central bank of China saying it bought 1 tonne of gold in September, the least since it paused any such reports from May to October last year, gold priced in Dollars today traded 118.7% above the 7-month low it hit back on 6th October 2023, eve of Hamas murdering more than 1,200 people across southern Israel and kidnapping a further 251.

At that point, gold prices were trading unchanged from the New Year, down some 12.5% from the peak of early 2022, when Russia began its invasion of Ukraine.

"It's incredibly difficult to be core short gold in a Trump world," says metals strategist Nicky Shiels at Swiss bullion refining and finance group MKS Pamp, pointing to the impetus given to gold prices by the President's domestic, international and trade tariffs policies.

"However, [gold looks like an] overcrowded trade that's overextended by every technical metric shifting the risk/reward in favor of a pullback toward $3600, the key level following Cook's firing and horrid Sept NFP [US jobs data] print."

With the City of Chicago and the State of Illinois suing the President to block him deploying National Guard troops in the USA's third largest city, news agency Reuters today said that Department of Housing boss Bill Pulte broke rules "meant to ensure that federal officials don't abuse their power for partisan purposes" when he referred central bank governor Lisa Cook for criminal charges over her personal mortgage applications.

"New cohorts of investors [are] looking for hedges against uncertainty and political difficulties," says analyst Rhona O'Connell at brokerage StoneX, adding that "Silver is outperforming, as is its wont when gold is moving with conviction."

Rising 127.8% since Hamas' October 7th attack on Israel in 2023, silver today fell back 65 cents from Monday's fresh 14-year highs in US Dollar terms of $48.77 per Troy ounce.

While silver currently enjoys no sovereign wealth or official sector demand, central-bank flows in gold are "not so one directional" as many analysts and investors may think, says Shiels at MKS Pamp.

"Given the strong price rerating, gold allocations are suddenly at significantly higher thresholds/weightings. That's changing strategic holders' mindsets from being vanilla gold accumulators to needing to actively risk manage growing gold exposure, [meaning] potential put buying, outright selling/derisking, or lending."

Russian government assets frozen by EU-US sanctions since its invasion of Ukraine could be used to grant a "Reparations Loan" to Kyiv worth up to €185 billion ($217bn) for defence and reconstruction, the European Union proposed Monday, seeking repayment only when Russia makes war reparations to Ukraine in a future peace deal.

"From my vantage point," said European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde, "we will be looking very attentively to make sure that what is proposed is in accordance with international law, mindful of financial stability."

Hamas meantime responded today to US President Trump's peace plan for Gaza by demanding the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces and the immediate start of a full reconstruction process, supervised by an unelected Palestinian body, while accusing the USA of "full partnership in the war of extermination" which Hamas says has killed more than 67,000 and injured 169,000.

With gold prices rising as silver slipped Tuesday, global stock markets and the price of Bitcoin both edged back from new all-time highs of their own.

US investment bank Goldman Sachs now says gold will trade around $4900 per ounce at the end of next year, raising its prediction from $4300 because the recent "western gold ETF inflows and likely central bank buying are sticky in our pricing framework, effectively lifting the starting point of our price forecast."