Silver and Gold Shrug Off Delay to US Fed's Interest Rate Cuts

SILVER and GOLD rallied again on Wednesday, trading at what were new all-time highs only 6 and 4 weeks ago respectively despite betting on US interest rates pushing back market expectations for a Fed cut from June to July following 'hawkish' comments from 3 regional Fed presidents.

Last time that the CME derivatives exchange's FedWatch tool said interest-rate traders didn't expect this June's meeting to end with a lower cost of borrowing than now was in late July.

The price of gold was then trading almost $2000 per Troy ounce below today.

That was just before the 'Friday chaos' in gold and other financial markets of 1st August, when US President Trump rolled out the heaviest import tariffs since the Great Depression while shockingly weak jobs data sent the odds of Federal Reserve rate cuts soaring.

Across 2025, the price of gold in US Dollars moved in the same direction as the odds of Fed rates being lower than today in June 60.0% of the time on a 5-session basis.

That has sunk to 35.1% of the time so far in 2026.

"Chicago Fed's [Austin] Goolsbee throws cold water on rate cuts," says a headline at Barron's magazine after one of the Federal Reserve's leading but non-voting members for 2026 said in a speech that "we stopped making progress on inflation" last year.

"With inflation at 3%" but the Fed's target at 2%, that "is not good enough."

"It'll be appropriate to hold in the current range for some time," said Boston Fed President Susan Collins in separate remarks.

Interest rates at the current 3.50% to 3.75% are "well positioned" agreed Richmond Fed President Tom Barkin, also not a voting member of the FOMC policy committee this year.

Spot gold prices in London's bullion market today touched $5200 per Troy ounce, showing a 2.7% rise for the week so far.

Silver meantime rose back above $90 per ounce, touching a 3-week high but still trading over 25% below end-January's record-high precious metals price spike.

"Despite [last Friday's] disappointing ruling, these powerful, country-saving...tariffs will remain in place under fully approved and tested alternative legal statutes," said US President Trump in his record-long State of the Union address to Congress last night, rebuking the Supreme Court's decision to over-turn the "emergency" import duties imposed by the White House last year.

"We're not going to see tariff relief in the longer run, and businesses know that," reckons Mary Lovely, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.