Silver Outruns Gold as Copper Leaps, India Hikes Import Duty

The PRICE of SILVER rose to 9-week highs in London trade Wednesday, far outrunning gold bullion as base metal copper hit fresh all-time records on signs of strong demand in China colliding with supply-chain risks from the US-Iran war blocking the Strait of Hormuz.

The Government of India meantime hiked customs duty on both gold and silver bullion, reversing India's shock cut to bullion import duty of mid-2024 in a bid to cap the country's swelling imports bill.

Crude oil held onto yesterday's 7.5% price jump after the International Energy Agency warned that energy stockpiles are shrinking at the fastest pace on record.

Betting on the US Federal Reserve's key interest rate now predicts that the Fed's next move will be to raise, not cut Dollar borrowing costs, most likely next spring.

Yet global stock markets today held at the past week's fresh all-time highs on the MSCI World Index, even as 10-year US Treasury yields rose to the highest since last July at 4.49%.

"Industrial metals are looking through the Middle East quagmire, just like equities," says precious metals strategist Nicky Shiels at Swiss bullion refining and finance group MKS Pamp.

Friday-to-Friday, gold and silver have gone in the same direction in 17 of 19 weeks so far in 2026.

But while gold on Wednesday traded 1.3% lower from last week-end, the price of silver showed a 7.5% rise, outrunning gold's 1.7% rise from a fortnight ago by 16.3 percentage points.

Industrially-useful silver today rose through $88 per troy ounce but gold struggled below $4700 today.

US Nymex copper futures meantime rose to new highs above $6.60 per pound after the London Metal Exchange's main contract touched $14,000 per ton on Tuesday, barely 3% below end-January's record peak.

That day also saw both gold and silver set their current all-time highs at $5594 and $121 per troy ounce respectively in spot-market trading.

Correlation analysis "implies 94% of silver's weekly price action is explained by copper," says Shiels at MKS Pamp.

"The model implied silver price with $14,000 copper is $99/oz."

Today's price action pushed the Gold/Silver Ratio − a simple measure of the 'safe haven' precious metal priced in its more industrially-useful cousin − down to 54.3, the lowest reading since end-January's 14-year lows of 45.

Consumer's in gold No.2 consumer nation India were urged at the weekend to refrain from buying precious metals to try easing the country's import bill. But the BJP Government today more than doubled customs duty on both gold and silver, hiking it from 6% to 15% and also raising platinum's import cost to 15.4% from 6.4%.

With India having next-to-no gold mining output while last year's silver imports were 10 times its domestic production, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has also urged Indian households to drive and fly less frequently to cut the subcontinent's energy import bill.