Is Asia About to Change the Gold Market Forever? -

Welcome to this week’s market wrap podcast, I’m Mike Gleason
Coming up don’t miss our exclusive interview with Ed Steer precious metals insider and publisher of Ed Steer’s Gold and Silver Digest, and also a member of the board of the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee, or GATA.
Ed tells us why bullion banks are still very much influencing the gold and silver markets in his view and explains why he believed the late January selloff was not a mere free market corrective situation but was in fact an engineered and coordinated event by those who didn’t want to see the metals continue to move higher.
Mike Maharrey’s guest also tells us why this correction in the metals in nearing its conclusion, and where he sees it going from here. So, be sure to stick around for another wonderful Money Metals interview with this week’s guest Ed Steer, coming up after this week’s market update. And as a reminder please download, like, rate and subscribe to this podcast wherever you consume this content.
Gold and silver spent much of the week on the defensive, although both metals stabilized and recovered some ground late in the week. The selling pressure since late June wasn't driven by a collapse in safe-haven demand. Instead, it reflected a tug-of-war between geopolitical risk – which often benefits precious metals – and rising inflation expectations, which pushed investors to reassess the outlook for Federal Reserve policy.
The latest catalyst came from a renewed escalation in the Middle East. Military exchanges between the United States and Iran intensified again after what had been a fragile ceasefire. Continued attacks around the Persian Gulf have kept traders focused on the possibility of disruptions to energy markets and shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world's most important oil chokepoints.
While geopolitical uncertainty would ordinarily be expected to send gold sharply higher, this time there's another force working in the opposite direction.
Higher oil prices raise the prospect of renewed inflation pressures. If energy costs remain elevated, the Federal Reserve could find itself keeping interest rates higher for longer. Since gold and silver don't generate income, rising interest-rate expectations tend to increase the opportunity cost of owning them. That dynamic has weighed on precious metals this month.
Despite the recent volatility, some encouraging signs emerged beneath the surface.
A modest pullback in the U.S. dollar late in the week helped provide support for gold, making bullion less expensive for overseas buyers.
From a technical standpoint, gold continues to consolidate after the sharp correction seen over the past several weeks. Analysts generally view the area around $4,035 as an important support level, while resistance remains near $4,200. Until one of those levels breaks decisively, traders should probably expect more sideways action.
Silver is telling a similar story. The white metal has bounced from recent lows and has regained some short-term momentum, but it too remains in a broader consolidation pattern. Support near $57 appears to be holding for now, while resistance around $63 continues to cap rallies. For longer-term investors, this kind of range-bound trading often represents a period of accumulation before the market chooses its next major direction.
As for the specifics of the weekly price action, gold is off 1.6% and checks in at $4,119. Silver is off more than $2.50 or 4.3% and trades at $60.43. Platinum is down 1.3% to come in at $1,635. And finally, palladium is unchanged at $1,291 as of this Friday midday recording.
Meanwhile, physical demand for precious metals remains resilient. Retail investors continue using price weakness as an opportunity to accumulate bullion, particularly given ongoing concerns surrounding government debt, inflation, geopolitical instability, and the long-term purchasing power of paper currencies.
Premiums on coins, rounds, and bars available at <a href="https://www.moneymetals.com/">Money Metals</a> have fallen, increasing the cost-efficiency of accumulating physical metal.
Looking ahead, markets will remain highly sensitive to developments in the Middle East, movements in crude oil prices, incoming inflation data, and of course any additional comments from Federal Reserve officials. Any indication that inflation is cooling could quickly revive expectations for easier monetary policy – a scenario that would likely provide renewed support for gold and silver.
Either way, investors should probably prepare for continued volatility. But as we've seen time and again, periods of uncertainty often create opportunities for disciplined, long-term precious metals investors.
Meanwhile, one of the biggest developments in the precious metals world this week didn't involve the price of gold – it involved where the global gold market is headed.
Hong Kong has officially launched a new government-backed gold clearing and settlement system, marking a major step in Asia's effort to compete with the centuries-old dominance of London, New York, and Switzerland in the global bullion trade.
The new platform is designed to mirror London's over-the-counter gold market while linking directly with the Shanghai Gold Exchange through a new "Delivery Connect" program. That means gold can move seamlessly between approved Hong Kong and Shanghai vaults without requiring costly re-assays or additional logistics – a significant efficiency that further integrates China's domestic gold market with international trading.
Officials also plan to expand Hong Kong's vaulting capacity tenfold over the next three years and are considering tax incentives and even a renminbi-denominated gold futures contract to attract more global participants.
Now, it's worth noting that much of the new system will operate using "unallocated" gold accounts, similar to the fractional-reserve model common in London. While that structure increases trading liquidity, it also leaves investors exposed to counterparty risk because customers own a claim on gold rather than specific allocated bars.
The bigger story, however, is the continuing migration of the global gold market from West to East.
China and India already account for more than half of global retail gold investment demand, central banks across Asia continue to accumulate bullion, and increasingly the infrastructure supporting that demand is being built closer to where the metal is ultimately consumed.
Taken together, these developments reinforce a trend we've been discussing for years: the center of gravity in the global gold market is steadily shifting eastward. As that transition continues, it could reshape everything from pricing power and trading volumes to the future role of Western exchanges in the international precious metals marketplace.
Well now, without further delay let’s get right to our exclusive interview with a metals market insider.
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Mike Maharrey: Greetings. I'm Mike Maharrey and I'm joined today by Ed Steer. Ed is a longtime observer of the gold and silver markets and the publisher of Ed Steer's Gold and Silver Digest. He's also on the board of GATA, the Gold Antitrust Action Committee. How are you doing today, Ed?
Ed Steer: I'm doing okay, Mike.
Mike Maharrey: Well, I appreciate you taking a little bit of time out of your day. We were talking beforehand that we're both a little bit under the weather, so we're going to make this be awesome anyway because that's what we do. But I really do. I appreciate you taking a little time out of your day. So, I kind of wanted to just start off in just kind of a big picture overview of what's been going on. We had the big correction in gold and silver in January and then basically since then we've had the war dominating headlines and gold and silver have both been basically trading sideways with quite a bit of volatility. So, I guess first off, what do you see needing to happen? What do you think needs to happen to get gold and silver going again in either direction? And what in your view is the most likely next step for the precious metals up or down?
Ed Steer: Okay. Well look, I just want to back up a bit and go back to last year sometime when the rallies that we saw that culminated at the end of January occurred. And what we saw was that the bullion banks, the eight large traders began covering the short positions last year, sometime around May or June. And that was one of the reasons as the price began to tick higher. I remember back at the start of this, all of us $27 an ounce. Silver was 27. And as the banks covered more and more of their short positions, of course they're buying long contracts so the price starts to rise. And then it really got going at the beginning of December when the speculators started to pile in. But the bullion banks in both gold and silver continued to cover their short positions until the thing went almost parabolic in the last what, three or four days before they finally stepped on the price at the end of January it was going up like three, four or $5 a day.
So, it was going to get away from them. And basically what the precious metals were doing was trying to find their intrinsic value because they've been suppressed through all of recorded histories. Nobody knows what the true free market prices are of either of these precious metals or a whole bunch of other commodities. But the shorts, everybody that was short, silver, gold, platinum, plenty, whatever was going up parabolic at the time, most of them, they were screaming and paying because they had to meet margin calls and it was just costing them a fortune. And some of them were in dire financial straits. So what happened is that the eight large bullion banks that control the prices of the precious metals came in and just killed the market at the end of January. And this engineered sell off, because that's what it is. I mean, the prices have not been declining because of free market forces that work.
They've been engineered lower and the banks have been covering more short positions on the way down. So this has been going on now since the end of January. And as you correctly pointed out, we're getting near to the bottom of this cycle. And as for what we've had this war and stuff going on, despite that the prices continue to be engineered lower. And for what will start this thing off is the same thing that starts off all rallies. It all depends on what the big eight commercial traders in gold and silver do. If they decide to stand back and let prices rise, that's what they'll do. And if they go back into the market and try to cover more shorts, then we'll see prices rise as well. But nothing happens onto the upside of the downside until the big eight traders, all the bullion banks decide that the prices are going to be allowed to rise or they're going to be killed like they were at the end of January.
But one thing is for sure, we're far, far closer to the bottom of this price cycle than we are to the top. So this is almost done. And some people say there's a seasonality to silver and gold. And I'm not arguing with that point, but the fact of the matter is that starting in July or August or whenever we're going to see prices rise again. And I expect before the end of the year, we're going to see silver back in triple digit prices, but only if the commercial traders, the big bullion banks allow it.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah. I'm curious as to your thoughts on this. I thought it was interesting, particularly watching silver during that big run. And we saw quite a few articles, a lot of reporting on the fact that there were shortages of metal in London. There was a strong demand coming out of India. We'd already seen a large movement of physical metal from London to New York earlier in the year due to the threat of tariffs. And so it was almost like they kind of blew it off as, oh, there's just kind of a misallocation of metal, no problem. We'll just move it and it'll be fine. But did that kind of maybe expose a little bit the difficulty that some of these big players are having now in really controlling the market? Did that signal some vulnerability on their part in your mind?
Ed Steer: Oh heavens, yes. As everybody that's listening to this podcast knows, we've been had a structural silver deficit and now in our sixth year. We're consuming far, far more than we're producing. And that shortage of the LBMA that popped up last October came as a bit of a surprise because the people that follow that market as best they can, because it's very opaque, assumed that there was about 150 million ounces of free float on the LBMA of silver available if anybody wanted to buy it. But that turned out to be a complete non-starter because all of a sudden they got to a situation where there was just nothing there. And they had to fly in silver from London for out of New York for months at a time to get that deficit situation under control. So all these stories we hear about, wow, it's a metal.
The fact of the matter is that the physical supply is so tight out there right now that they're just trying to figure out how they can get prices high enough without blowing up the market. Because like I said, we've been in a structural deficit now, but I don't care how many ounces, 200 million or 300 million ounces per year. You can't keep this up forever. Sooner or later, you're just going to run out of the stuff. And then we're going to see a discontinuous price event to the upside, which is what we saw unfolding at the end of January. Now they were obviously able to put that fire out, but it doesn't change anything from a supply demand fundamentals and they can blow smoke up or crack with nice stories in the mainstream press about being an allocation problem or whatever. But the fact of the matter is precious metals prices have been suppressed for the last 50 plus years.
And all that's happening now is that the supply demand fundamentals are catching up and how they're going to start this Gordian knot out, I have no idea, but the end result will be a three digit silver price that we can't possibly imagine right now.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah. Economics wins in the end pretty much every time. Whenever anybody talks about the manipulation and the role that these large bullion banks have in kind of dictating and directing price movements, inevitably people will say to me, "Well, Mike, why would you even invest in this space at all then?" How do you answer folks like that? Why should people be interested in precious metals if indeed it's being heavily manipulated?
Ed Steer: Well, I remember when I first got started in this back about 1998, I went to my local bullion store, which didn't carry any bullion. I mean, that's how depress the market was. He had about four one ounce bars then a 10 ounce bar. And I ended up buying that. I'm in Canada, so I think I paid $5 for it. And gold was like $250 an ounce. I said, "Who would pay 250 for an ounce of gold? I think I'll buy silver at five." So that's what I did. And of course I ignored gold much to my dismay. Now you look at the price, if I could have those days back. But the thing is, I knew the price was suppressed back then. And so I bought it at $5 and that's Canadian dollars. And of course the billion dollars’ worth far less now. And I think it's selling for 80 or $90 Canadian right now.
Our dollar's 40% less in the US. So if you up to 60, it's $85. So my $5 investment that I bought way back in 1999, and of course I've added to it since, five into 80 is what? So they've kept the precious metal suppressed and gold's gone from 250 up to north of 5,000. So even though it's suppressed, I've done very, very well for myself. And even though the stocks aren't doing quite well right at the moment, I remember buying First Majestic Silver for $3 a share and I bought, what was the other one? Wheaton precious metal. It used to be called Silver Wheaton back in the days when it first was first. I think I bought that for a dollar a share. And it was selling for like 140 or 150. So it's suppression or no suppression. The precious metals have done very well and we've had this one minor setback, but sooner or later the supply demand fundamentals cannot be denied.
And we're going to see a silver price that reflects the supply and demand fundamentals, which have been just screaming by for the last five or six years.
Somebody said who it was, said you should buy things when blood is running in the streets. Well, that's exactly what's happening. If you look at your computer screen here today is Wednesday and they clubbed the silver price in gold prices after Comex closed on Tuesday night. And then they bombed it in London, all four of them in London at 9:16 AM. I looked at that precisely and the candles are all at the same time. So everybody's looking. I don't want to buy precious metals. I don't want to buy this stock, but this is the time you buy it. And I've been eating my own cooking because I've been buying stocks here for the last week or so. And I know that sooner or later I'm going to be well rewarded. So manipulation or no manipulation, this is the time to buy.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah, absolutely. I've found an interesting thing. I wanted to run this by you. I was just reading through the World Gold Council’s … they kind of did a summary of the market through the first half of the year. And at the very end, there was something that really struck me as interesting. If you look at the price movement of gold, if you just take the Asian trading sessions and just pull them out by themselves, gold is actually up 12.9% in the first six months of the year. If you just look at the North American trading sessions, gold is actually down a little bit over 15%. So you kind of have this cycle where overnight in Asian markets are buying and in the US and the North American markets are selling in the morning time. And I kind of picked up on this just watching the price ticker, but the World Gold Council kind of confirmed that.
What do you make of that?
Ed Steer: I'll tell you what, I've written two or three essays on that over the last 20 or so years. And once we get this interview over, I'll dig one up and I'll send you the link for it. This has been going on for a long time without exception since the COMEX began trading futures markets in gold back in 1975, January 2nd starting in 1975. The price has always fallen between the morning gold fix in London and the afternoon gold fix in London always without exception. So, if you bought at the London open and sold at the COMEX close, you lost money. But if you bought at the Comex closed and sold the next morning, prices were always up. They're always down in London and New York and always up in the Far East. And this has been going on for 50 plus years. So, this is not surprising.
So, the pricing is really being set in the Far East, but then New York and London come along and kill the price of the following day. This is the West versus the East. It wrote large regarding gold, the financial system, economics, East versus West. Call it what you will, but this is the pricing mechanism that the West is trying to suppress in this West versus East fight. So I'm amazed that the World Gold Council will actually publish that sort of information because once you look at the real charts and I'll send them to you and you can put it as a link below this podcast so people can see what the numbers actually are and they're just absolutely astonishing. Even though we've been through this bull market, if you invested $100 on January 2nd, 1975 at the London Fix in the morning and sold at the London Fix in the afternoon, you'd have $6.12 left.
I think that's what the number was the last time I looked at it. But if you bought at the Comex close and sold it at the London Open the following day, I think your profits would be somewhere north of $30,000.
Mike Maharrey: Wow! That's amazing.
Ed Steer: It is unbelievable when you see the actual numbers. When you told me that, this is the first I heard of it, the World Gold Council pointed that out. So it is so, so obvious that it's the West versus the East. And at some point the East is going to take over the pricing mechanism and we're going to find out what the true free market prices are. So it's a battle between East and West and the gold market, the financial system and for all the power and all the money in the world.
Mike Maharrey: That was kind of my next question because we just saw that Hong Kong and Singapore are both kind of building out infrastructure to be more involved in the global gold pricing. They're building vaults, they're creating pricing mechanisms there. And that was kind of my next question and you answered it, but I'd love for you to expound on it a little bit. Do you think that the East is eventually going to wrest control and what will that result be?
Ed Steer: Okay. Well, this has been going on for a while now since the Shanghai Gold Exchange opened when I can't remember when the heck it was, but it was like decades and decades ago. So slowly but surely as China and Russia and India and the East have risen from the economic and financial ashes from the last hundred years, they've exerted more and more influence and they've gone big into the gold market and they're the biggest consumer of commodities, the biggest producer of them. So the pricing mechanism from the Western globalist power elite, which used to rule the world through there are various empires, whether it be the British Empire, the American Empire, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, you take the East and the South are tired of this and they've finally gotten thrown off the yoke of colonial rule and they're rising under their own volitions now.
And the power is now shifting from the old colonial empires to the empire or the countries that used to be suppressed. And as they say, payback will be a bitch one of these days. So this power mechanism right now, the pricing mechanism, the price is still set in the Comex futures market in New York, the Globex Comex future system. Someday it will be set in Shanghai on the Shanghai Gold Exchange, which is a pure physical market. Whereas in London and New York, it's a completely paper market. So, everything we see out there as far as prices go are totally artificial like we're witness to here today on Wednesday. So, as to when that's going to happen, I have no idea how it's going to happen. I have no idea. But the fact is it is going to happen sooner or later. And I think that at some point we're just going to run out of physical gold and physical silver.
And when those markets break in London and in New York, the only way to be able to save the shorts from financial ruin, which means the Western bullion banks will be to close the LBMA and close the Comex. And then the price mechanism will automatically shift to Shanghai because they're the biggest producers and consumers of gold and silver. And that's where the price should be set anyway.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah. It's interesting whenever I start hearing people talk about things like this, I always think of the old phrase, things happen slowly and then all at once. I could really see it being one of those things that seems very sudden although as you note, this has been ongoing for decades now. It's interesting to kind of see how that plays out over time. Yeah.
Ed Steer: Well, that's Hemingway's quote. How do you go bankrupt slowly at first and suddenly? So that's where that phrase comes from. But that's exactly what's happening. It's sort of creeping along. Mission creep as they just would open this and we'll do that. We're going to store some gold here. We'll open up these bullion volves, one in Saudi Arabia, one in Singapore, and now this one in Hong Kong. And I see a story about HSBC, British bank opening up all. We're going to put 200 tons of gold in Hong Kong. So slowly but surely it is all creeping over towards China. And like I said, you just don't know what day it's going to be, but when it comes, it's going to be slowly at first. 100% correct about that. It's slowly a first then suddenly.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah. I wanted to just touch on real quick before we wrap up the Fed and Kevin Warsh taking over the chairmanship. And he's been very, very hawkish and that's kind of the mainstream narrative right now. We've got a Federal Reserve that's going to hold rates higher for longer. He's an inflation hawk. Therefore, gold being a non-yielding asset. Nobody wants it. That's kind of what we're hearing in the mainstream. I'm curious what you think the Fed's going to look like moving forward, because I'm not quite as confident as the rest of the world that Warsh is going to be able to hold rates higher even if he wants to.
Ed Steer: I'll tell you what, there's a question that nobody… There's countless answers for that. But the fact of the matter is that the United States has a $40 trillion deficit in climate and that doesn't include unfunded liabilities. The West collectively, including the Federal Reserve, is broke and hopelessly in debt. I don't care whether you're looking at Japan or Germany or Britain or France or here in Canada. We have unpayable debt. And there's just no way out of that. They're going to try to keep rates suppressed. I noticed the 10-year yield is up the last two days in a row.
But the fact of the matter is that there's only two ways to get rid of that debt. It's either default on it or inflate it away. So those are the two choices that Warsh has faced. And I don't care what he wants to do, the market will tell him what's going to happen. And basically what you're going to see is you're going to see the prices of paper currencies go into the dirt and we're going to see the continued rise of gold and silver, whether Warsh wants it or not because as you know, gold is now the number one as the number two asset, number one asset in the world after US Treasury. So gold and silver are, as we watch in the last couple of years, are re-monetizing themselves. And that process is going to continue regardless of what Warsh wants or not because they're printing money at $2 trillion a year deficit.
This can't go on forever. And then sooner or later, what the Fed decides to do or not do is going to be irrelevant.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah. I agree 100%. It's kind of funny in a way. It's almost ironic that Alan Greenspan passed away recently because he was known as he was the gold bug. He was all in for sound money until he was actually in a position to do something. And then he cranked up the burning press just like the rest of them. So, that's kind of another reason to not be real impressed with Warsh's rhetoric. And my good friend, Greg Weldon, who's often on the show, he calls it a debt black hole. And I love that analogy because of the way a black hole impacts everything around it because of the gravity. This debt that everybody seems to be ignoring is going to have that same impact on the economy, I believe.
Ed Steer: Oh, sure. And the thing is, this whole thing could have been averted except for the West desire, especially the US desire for power. If they hadn't taken the world off the gold standard back in, was it 1971 and allowed them to print as much fiat currency, then everything would be fine. But they chose to go the root of empire and the only way they could do that is run up unsustainable debts. And here we are 50 plus years later and the piper has to be paid.
Mike Maharrey: Yep. Absolutely. And I tell people this a lot. In our business, it doesn't really pay to guarantee anything because markets are fickle and things change quickly. But one thing I'm very comfortable in guaranteeing is that the dollar will be worth less a year from now than it is today. And I have no qualms. I would bet any amount of money that that is a fact. I don't think that they're actually ever going to make the Fiat currency more sound, which is why we talk about gold and silver here. I've got one more kind of a fun question for you that I like to ask folks and just kind of see what their answer is. Do you have a favorite gold or silver coin or bullion product that you really like? And it can be for any reason, you just like the way it looks or the utility or whatever it is.
Do you have a particular thing that's kind of special to you?
Ed Steer: I'll tell you what, I worked in the retail bullion trade part-time for four years about 10 or so years ago. And so I've seen every conceivable silver and gold product cross the counter either as a seller or as a buyer of it. And to tell you the truth, I really don't have a favorite per se because I've seen it all. And some are prettier than others and some are… Do I have a favorite? Absolutely not at all. But if you had put a gun to my head and said, okay, if you had to choose, what would it be? I said, okay, fine. I like the Royal Canadian mint 10-ounce bar. That's probably one of my favorites.
Mike Maharrey: Nice. Why?
Ed Steer: Just because I bought and sold this stuff for a long time. When they first came out with the product, I saw it for the first time when I was in the store. I looked at it, I said, "I'll tell you what, this is going to become one of the standard 10 ounce bars in the industry." And that's turned out to be the case. And I don't know why. Okay. The Australian, I like anything out of Australia. The Australian coins and bars are wonderful. It's just unfortunate that here in Canada, especially where I live in Canada, that that sort of thing is not available unless you order it online.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah. Yeah. That's a shame. Yeah, just kind of a fun question I like to ask folks. For me, I really like Krugerrands and simply because of the fact is that's what my grandfather collected and he had a love for it and he kind of passed that on to me. Kind of sentimental. So where can we send folks that want to avail themselves of more Ed Steer? I know you've got your newsletter. So where do you like to send people to check that out and also any of your social media platforms that you'd like to highlight?
Ed Steer: I'm not on social media at all. And if you want to see what I have to offer and just Google my name, Ed Steer, S-T-E-E-R. Ed Steer, Gold & Silver, my website will pop up. There's a tab on there that says sample column. You can click on that. And that column contains all the kinds of information that I provide either on a daily basis, weekly or monthly basis. That sort of detailed fact-based information is what you are interested in. It costs $100 US per year for about 260 columns. So it's very affordable. I
Mike Maharrey: Was going to say it's a pretty darn good deal.
Ed Steer: It is.
Mike Maharrey: And you're probably a saner man not being hooked into social media so good for you on that.
Ed Steer: I don't have the time for it, Mike. Not at all. I don't have time for it at all.
Mike Maharrey: I believe it. Well, I really do appreciate it speaking of time, that you took a little bit of time out of your day and hung out with me. Appreciate your insights. It's always good to hear from you. We'll make sure that I think the last time you were on this show was 2024. So we'll make sure it's not that long this time around, but thank you again so much. And folks do go check out Ed's website and avail yourself to the great analysis that he provides. So thanks again, Ed.
Ed Steer: Thank you, Mike.
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After a fairly lengthy hiatus it was good to have Ed Steer back on the podcast and get his view on things, and I hope you enjoyed that interview.
Well, that will do it for this week. Be sure to check back next Friday for our next Weekly Market Wrap Podcast. And remember to tune in as well to the Money Metals Midweek Memo, hosted by Mike Maharrey.
To check out any of our audio programs just visit <a href="https://www.moneymetals.com/podcasts">MoneyMetals.com/podcasts</a> or find them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. And as a big help to us we would ask you to please like, subscribe, download and rate our podcasts. Doing so helps us extend the reach of this material.
Until next time, this has been Mike Gleason with <a href="https://www.moneymetals.com/">Money Metals Exchange</a>, thanks for listening and have a wonderful weekend everybody.

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