Gold Price Stuck at $4400 as Copper and Crude Oil Surge

The PRICE of GOLD struggled again at $4400 per ounce in London on Tuesday as inflation expectations and long-term interest rates held firm on soaring oil and copper prices.

Silver bullion prices also traded lower for the week so far, reversing Monday's $1 pop to fall back below $66 per troy ounce as betting on next week's US Federal Reserve meeting put the odds of a rate rise at 3-in-5 according to the CME derivatives exchange's FedWatch tool.

US Comex copper futures meantime set a fresh all-time high, while Brent crude oil rose towards $100 per barrel, a near 4-year high when hit during the early days of the US-Israeli war on Iran, now running for more than 6 months.

With the US administration of President Trump failing to deny or confirm that it's about to re-impose trade tariffs on imports of refined copper, American buyers are rushing to stockpile the vital base metal once more, the South China Morning Post quotes the half-trillion US dollar China Asset Management company.

That's pulled London Metal Exchange inventories to 5-month lows and Shanghai Futures Exchange warehouse holdings down to 2024 levels.

Over in energy, "It's certainly true that bullish speculative positioning is increasing prices," says a commodity trading note from UK bank Lloyds, "but this is backed by solid fundamentals.

"The ongoing repricing is underpinned not only by a lack of progress on talks in the Middle East, but also the loss of Russian diesel supply amid ever-extending export bans following Ukrainian attacks."

Following US envoys Witkoff and Kushner's visit to Moscow and Kyiv, "We expect the resumption of trilateral talks between Russia, the United States, and Ukraine," said a Kremlin spokesman today as a massive drone and missile attack killed 3 people in the Ukrainian capital.

The UK today joined Canada, France and 10 other European nations in banning products from illegal Israeli settlements in Palestine's West Bank, a move condemned as "anti-Semitic" by Jerusalem's finance minister.

Saudi-backed government forces in Yemen made counterattacks against Iran-backed Houthi rebels, whose drones and missiles hit 4 cities in southern Saudi Arabia overnight.

"Iran will continue its brave resistance with strength until the aggressors fully regret it," said Tehran's President Pezeshkian today.

US government bond prices meanwhile fell Tuesday as trading returned from the long Labor Day weekend, briefly pushing the yield demanded by investors to buy 10-year Treasury debt back up to last Wednesday's peak above 4.80% per annum, the highest since late-2023.

"Insufficient global capital expenditure on copper mines and declining grades at older mines will keep supply elasticity low over the next one to two years," says Chinese futures brokerage Cinda, "while emerging demand – from power grids, energy storage, new-energy infrastructure, and AI data centres – remains in an expansionary cycle."

New data so far this week has raised Q2 GDP both for the 21-nation Eurozone and for Japan, putting growth in the world's 2nd and 4th largest economies at 1.2% and 1.4% per year between April and June.

No.2 single economy China − also gold's No.1 mining, consumer and central-bank buying nation − grew its exports by 25% year-on-year in August, swelling its monthly trade surplus close to January and June's records above $120 billion.

With silver also possibly due for re-tariffing by the Trump administration, New York warehouse stocks of the industrially-useful precious metal have now swollen by 1/3rd after erasing all of last year's Trump tariffs silver stockpiling.