Gold & Precious Metals Corner

Wednesday, 2026-09-16 · covering the last 24h

Market signal

The Fed hikes for the first time since 2023, then a hawkish Kevin Warsh erases the day's gains in gold and silver within half an hour. The FOMC voted 12-0 to raise the federal-funds rate 25bp to 3.75–4.00%; going into the 2pm ET announcement, December gold futures had settled at $4,387.50 (+1.26% on the session) and silver at $64.92 (+1.66%), with the dollar index up 0.61% to 100.28 — a seven-week high — and the 10-year Treasury yield at a fresh 52-week high of 5.00%. Warsh then used the press conference to reaffirm the inflation threat and point to a dot plot in which 16 of 18 officials see at least one more hike this year (four pencil in two), and bullion slumped as much as 1.3% in the reaction, giving back the session's gains; platinum and palladium held roughly flat near $1,725 and $1,287, keeping the gold/silver ratio close to 67.6. Miners felt it too — GDX swung from a session high near $96 to close around $93 on volume nearly a third above its 20-day average. Investrade · Yahoo Finance

Upstream — miners, streamers & supply

A gold-mine shaft collapse in Sudan's RSF-held West Kordofan kills dozens of artisanal miners. Adjoining shafts gave way at the al-Zaraa mine near al-Nuhud on Tuesday; death tolls range from Reuters' reported 60 to an RSF source's 82 dead and 50 wounded, with dozens more missing in loose, sandy soil that rescuers without specialised equipment are struggling to clear. The site sits in territory the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces has held since Sudan's civil war began in 2023, and the Sudan Doctors Network says basic safety measures were absent — a reminder of how much artisanal, conflict-adjacent supply still feeds into the gold market outside the majors' own output. Al Jazeera

Otherwise, no material company-specific news across the majors, the silver/PGM producers or the royalty-streaming trio this window. Sibanye-Stillwater's USW strike at its Montana PGM operations remains unresolved, unchanged from our last report.

Physical & official flows — central banks, ETFs & bullion

Institutional buyers keep shifting out of SPDR's flagship GLD and into its cheaper cousins, not out of gold itself. GLD shed roughly $603 million over the trailing week (data published September 14), while the lower-fee GLDM, IAU and IAUM together took in more than $400 million — a fee-arbitrage rotation rather than a risk-off signal: the annual cost gap between GLD and IAUM runs about $31,000 a year on a $10 million position. No new central-bank purchase disclosures, WGC data or COMEX/LBMA inventory releases broke in the window; China's roughly 20-tonne August PBoC purchase and Poland's year-to-date accumulation, both already reported, stand unchanged. GoldSilver.com

Silver & PGMs — the industrial complex

No fresh industrial-demand, recycling or autocatalyst news broke in this window; the solar-thrifting and structural-deficit debate covered earlier this week stands unchanged.

The Chatter

Vince Lanci — GoldFix (Substack): In "Goldman: One (Rate Hike) and Done," Lanci notes that even as the bank's economists argued against a September hike, its trading desk still expects fresh all-time highs in gold before year-end — and reads that gap between Goldman's own hawkish-Fed call and its bullish gold call as the more informative signal than Wednesday's hike itself. Post

Nicky Shiels — MKS Pamp (via BullionVault): Shiels argues gold's level implies the market thinks the Fed should hike only once more within six months, while the rates market is pricing two — one of them is wrong. With real policy rates "barely positive" against 3.7% PCE inflation, she frames this as a Fed playing catch-up rather than tightening, which is why gold isn't behaving like a market bracing for real restriction. Post

Tavi Costa — Crescat Capital (via SGT Report): Costa argues the roughly $46/oz gap between silver's spot price and the global average all-in sustaining cost (per the Silver Institute's 2026 survey) is the widest in recorded mining history, and frames that cushion — not the spot price itself — as the real case for silver miners' staying power even through a significant pullback. Post