A Wild Day Of Tariffs & Trade Wars, & Where That Leaves Gold & Silver (Uncut) 03-06-2025

A Wild Day Of Tariffs & Trade Wars, & Where That Leaves Gold & Silver

The last 48 hours describing this tariff and trade war, tit for tat, is a signal for rising nationalism, rising reciprocal behavior, and a bigger desire to have your gold stateside in anticipation of even worse things to come. Welcome to the Morning Markets and Metals with Vince Lancey, where each morning Vince brings you the financial and precious metals news to get you ready for your day. And now, here’s Vince.

Good morning. I’m Vince Lancey, and this is the Gold Fixed Market Rundown. We will be discussing mercantilism or mercantile behavior on display.

And in premium, we’re going to discuss the last time this happened, meaning the last time gold was repatriated in such zealous fashion. Bear with me here. I’m trying to catch up.

These things take three hours in the morning now. Unbelievable. I have to cut down on this.

All right. At least the work I’m doing. Let’s start with the markets.

The dollar is down 24, 10-year yields are unchanged, S&P 500 is 57.63, very weak, down 72 handles. The VIX is 24 and change up two, gold is 2,900, down 16. In context, it makes sense.

Silver 32.34, down 29 after a huge day yesterday. Copper 471, down 2 cents after a huge day yesterday. WTI 66.72, up 16, counter yesterday’s activity.

Natural gas 452, down 5 cents, no big whoop for natural gas. Bitcoin 90,000 and change, stabilizing down 440. Platinum 941, platinum 964, pretty much unchanged, a little bit there, mixed up.

Grains, soy 10.03, up 4, corn 441, down 2, and wheat 548, down 1. All right. These are the stories we put out yesterday and the day before. Jim Rickards put out a post, we titled it, Can the U.S. Even Sell Its Gold? It’s actually a recap on all the buying in gold, but I think the new information that he put there was about the possibility or potentiality of the U.S. actually selling its gold.

A good morning note went out yesterday, as we were not doing any video, with some insights on Trump’s behavior with regards to tariffs. At least something to look forward to. 5209, that’s a midterm exam we just gave to our students.

The Michael Oliver interview, that’s 90 minutes. Some of you may have been watching pieces of that on Arcadia Economics. The full interview is there.

Big bets on 3500 placed. We thought this was a really good look into how macro discretionary traders behave, and so we shared it. But since then, we’ve kind of thinking that maybe it’s the U.S. gold purchases in context.

That’s interesting, and we’ll be doing more on that, hopefully, as more comes in. All right. There’s the homepage.

Mercantile behavior on display. Markets closed higher yesterday. Now, we’re riffing, we’re going to riff on something that we read coming out of J.P. Morgan, as shared by, or as broken down, I should say, by Zero Edge.

Markets closed higher yesterday. U.S. markets, fueled by comments from Howard Lutnick, suggesting potential relief on Canada and Mexico tariffs. Initially, yesterday’s meet-in-the-middle rhetoric was seen as a sign of reduced tariff risk.

Now, what I’m going through here describes yesterday, and today, what’s happening right now, kind of confirms the opinion coming out of J.P. Morgan and other actually sharp banks on this concept yesterday. All right. So, anyway.

However, Lutnick’s Bloomberg interview, I think it was at one o’clock, with the White House’s mid-afternoon press briefing, right? And, right, in combination, clarified that while the 25% tariffs will remain, certain exemptions, like autos, are possible. Stocks bounced in response to this perceived softening of trade tensions. Does this actually reduce tariff risk? No.

Equities may be pricing at lower risk, at least they did yesterday. They bounced, but uncertainty increased from this. It did not decrease.

Auto tariffs are delayed, not removed. Canada won’t back down now unless all U.S. tariffs are lifted. This keeps the door open for further escalation.

Interesting how Trudeau goes from commie socialist to nationalist overnight. I guess Klaus must have given him his marching orders. All right.

April 2nd, reciprocal tariffs are still on, so we could reciprocate their reciprocation more if this continues. Both Lutnick and the White House reaffirmed this. Now, the bottom line, according to what’s happening right now, is that Michael Hartnett has been right.

Buy bonds, buy international stocks, and buy gold. So what does that mean for the markets? Oh, I’m sorry. I have these beautiful little highlighted pages.

Let’s go through this. Geopolitically speaking, nationalism and patriotism are rising everywhere. Do not be surprised if Klaus Schwab goes from global socialist to neo-nationalist just like his uncle Adolf did.

Dictatorial despots tend to be born of frustrated socialists unable to get their way. Hell hath no fury like a pissed-off commie. Anyway, as a result, since Tuesday morning, okay, so through the Wednesday behavior and the seeming retraction, banks like JPMorgan shifted their stance to bearish on US equities, favoring global markets instead.

We’ll get to what Hartnett’s talking about in a second. We would remind viewers right now that many times over the past three months, we had shared and elaborated and explained on Michael Hartnett’s concepts, only Zero Hedge does more in that area. Stance to describe his idea of what’s going to unroll for 2025.

He called it a big trade. Buy bonds, that’s the B, buy international stocks, that’s the I, and buy gold, that’s the G. So buy bonds because recession risk is bigger here. And I know we can head for stagflation, excuse me, but bonds will be supported relative to equities.

Buy international stocks as they will outperform US stocks. That was his advice to his client, implicitly saying there is get out of the mag seven. And G, buy gold as the whole thing is not just inflationary, but a spreading problem associated with globalism’s death, increased deficit spending, and general uncertainty.

Now, he didn’t say that part, we did. Let’s show you the chart a little bit closer. Could be bigger.

Well, included. This is a chart of gold imports coming into the US. There are three circled spikes there.

One is in COVID 2020, one is during war, when the war started, and the third one is now that we’re currently in. But why are we bringing that up? Because gold has actually become a predictor. So yesterday’s behavior in the markets was actually, there you go.

Yesterday’s behavior in the markets was actually an example of this BIG manufacturing asserting itself. So outside the US, let’s bring this. Remember, an emerging market is gold.

If gold’s going up, gold’s viewed as a competitor with a dollar. So as emerging markets go up, that’s the same thing in dollar terms as gold’s going up. And that’s why keeping emerging markets down and keeping gold down are the same thing economically.

So let’s look at what happened outside the US yesterday. Outside the US, risk assets performed. China’s National People’s Congress boosted sentiment, sending Chinese tech stocks soaring.

JPMorgan’s Haibin Zhu noted that while policy targets aligned with expectations, market reaction suggested renewed optimism for Chinese growth. They’re going to stimulate to counter tariffs. They’re going to grow their economy or try to prevent it from cratering from US policy.

Meanwhile, surprisingly, European equities surged. The DAX gained 3.4%. Yesterday, it’s now up 16% year-to-date compared to the US SPX down a little bit less than 1%. Well, probably now 1% after today.

This rally is being driven by, the European rally is being driven by stronger defense spending and Germany’s decision to lift its debt ceiling. Now, those two things also in combination were the main driver of German and euro bonds in general getting decimated. Europe is about to spend more on domestic guns and less on immigration butter.

So to speak, the money will have to come from somewhere. If this continues, expect more weakness in bonds, in their bonds, more strength in their stocks, and more strength in the euro as money comes home to defend the fatherland. So it’s bearish for the dollar.

All right. What does this mean in the context of gold and the trade war? Coming into 2025, the expectation was that the average GDP growth of 2.9% over the past 2.5 years in the US would continue. That outlook has now deteriorated due to escalating trade tensions.

Now, this is J.P. Morgan. They’re good economists. Let’s put it that way.

J.P. Morgan’s Michael cut his Q1 real GDP estimate from 2.25% to 1.5%. That’s a big cut overnight. Now, I’m not saying that he thought of it overnight. I’m saying that he was probably holding back, looking for reasons to think that this was temporary.

Right? Okay. Well, here’s the reason. Tariffs no longer look like a mere negotiating cycle or tactic.

They’re becoming structural. And they also say, we did not expect this level of escalation. We appear to have been wrong.

And I think, speaking for myself, I’ve been wrong as well. I mean, I’m not wrong, right? I’m not right, but I’m not wrong yet. Trump uses tariffs as a tactical tool in negotiation.

But he’s also in a desire to really negotiate very strongly when he faces up with Putin and Xi. So they have to be real, at least for the next year or so, it seems. So you could take it however you want to.

But it isn’t over yet, right? Let’s assume that it still is a tactic. Let’s assume that it’s still just temporary, right? There is still lots of room for Trump to declare victory and say, or say he was kidding. But make no mistake about it.

All nations are moving towards self-sufficiency and isolationism now. And all of them have begun counting their gold. Without it, the international trade will cease to exist going forward.

The gold and soon, actually now, silver genie are out of their bottle, right? That’s my lame attempt to get a decent picture out of AI. Ridiculous. Okay, data on deck, jobs this week.

Let’s go to the markets, final summary. That’s a weekly gold chart. That’s really constructive.

Here’s your eight and nine, all right? Let’s show you this. When gold gets an eight and nine on the weekly, showing signs of overbought, it still respects it. It just doesn’t dive.

You have a protracted sideways lower movement, right? That’s 23. And 24, you have a sideways choppy movement followed by a rally. Then you have a short bear flag.

And now you have a, well, here we are. The first week after the nine is up. The first week after the nine was down.

The first week after the nine was down. The first week after the nine was down. The first week after the nine is up.

So this trading range might be, this pullback might be a lot shorter than it seems. The day’s not over yet, but that’s it. On a daily basis, the trade is still to have butterflies on.

All the excitement aside, right? In between here and here, you don’t care, right? Or you wanna go as high as here, or as high as this week, that’s fine. So it’s like, sell this call, sell this call, I’m sorry, buy this call, sell these two calls, and buy that call. It’s not a trade recommendation.

It’s a butterfly that bets on sideways movement. Now, butterflies aside, if we go below here, I have said to you several times in the past, if we go below here, we’re probably gonna wash out. You know what? Every time we go below there, we get a nice down day, and we get a V-shaped bottom.

Here’s a V, here’s a V, here’s a V. Like, there are people out there catching knives, multiple people catching knives, okay? So I’m no longer extremely bearish below here. Now, there are levels that tells me we should go down to here if that happens, but that’s no longer extremely bearish. This is my level to be nervous, right? Other than that, I don’t care.

On the upside, however, I will say that we got capped. We traded sideways, we made a new high, and we got capped. So funds sold this, funds sold that, but I actually think BIS is still in here selling.

I think this market is capping the rally so people can accumulate. Silver is more interesting now. Silver, see this? That’s beautiful.

This is a daily. If we get above 3301, you can add 250 to the price. So 3301 gets you 3550.

That’s what I think. Now, maybe the price has to get above here. So let’s be fair.

Call it a close above 3301, 33, call 33, right? Or a print above 3330 adds 250 to the price. And when you look at that, that puts you in this area. So it looks good.

When’s the last time silver did this? Traded like gold, dipped like gold, and now snapped back. Usually silver stays depressed, and you can thank copper for that. You can thank copper for that.

Copper is now a tariff darling. Anyway, that’s it. So in summary, where is my screen there? I definitely need an assistant to do this stuff with me now.

Oh, there it is. In summary, the last 48 hours describing this tariff and trade war, tit for tat, is a signal for rising nationalism, rising reciprocal behavior, and a bigger desire to have your gold stateside in anticipation of even worse things to come. I’m Vince.

Have a great day. And before we wrap up, I would like to note that today’s show brought to you by Fortuna Mining, who did have their earnings out before the open today. And as you can see here, they reported their earnings for the fourth quarter and the full year of 2024.

And in terms of the results in the fourth quarter, they did have a record free cash flow of $95.6 million, net cash flow from operations of $141.6 million before working capital, and an attributable net income of $11.3 million or four cents per share. That also came after they returned $30.6 million to shareholders in the fourth quarter through the purchase of 6.4 million shares. And also already an additional $1.8 million has been returned to shareholders as 400,000 shares have been purchased in January of 2025.

And we will be having Jorge Ganoza, the CEO of Fortuna Mining, joining me along with Dave Kranzler for a live call at 3 p.m. Eastern today. So certainly if you are a Fortuna shareholder or thinking about becoming one, it’s a great chance to find out more about the results from the fourth quarter, the full last year, and perhaps even just as significantly what they are looking at going forward. So congratulations to Fortuna and congratulations to you at home for being a gold and silver investor.

Hope it’s been a nice part of your journey and we will see you back here again tomorrow. Please note that this video is not intended as legal licensed financial trading advice and is to be used for informational purposes only. Please contact your financial advisor before making any decisions and thanks for watching.