SILVER and PLATINUM extended this week’s sharp gains on Friday, outpacing ‘safe haven’ gold to hit new multi-year highs as Western stock markets also rose with copper and crude oil prices, as did lease rates for borrowing the industrially-useful precious metals.
New data today said GDP across the Euro area, the world’s 3rd largest currency zone economically, grew 1.5% per year between January and March, 0.3 points faster than Eurostat’s original Q1 estimate.
Retail sales across the 20-nation Eurozone then leapt past analyst forecasts for April, and the USA added more jobs than expected in May, with average wages in the world’s largest economy continuing to rise by 3.9% per year, solidly above the latest inflation data.
“Silver, platinum and copper surged past key levels,” says precious metals strategist Nicky Shiels at Swiss bullion refining and finance group MKS Pamp.
“The charts across all 3 look the same [with] technical momentum, improving fundamentals, growing investor interest.”
Fixing around $36.15 per Troy ounce today, silver set its highest midday benchmark price in London since the spike of 29 February 2012.
On a weekly basis, and following Thursday’s huge silver price move, that marked silver’s highest Friday fix for almost 14 years, adding 9.3% from last week-end.
That’s the steepest Dollar-price jump in silver since its 17.7% rebound of mid-August 2020, back amid the first-wave Covid Crisis.
Gold bullion meanwhile fixed close to mid-May’s record weekend level, trading above $3340 per Troy ounce at 3pm in London before falling $10 by the close of trade.
Year-to-date, platinum now matches the former ‘monetary’ metals’ gains in percentage terms, trading at $1168 per ounce around Friday’s 2.30pm bullion auction with a 9.0% jump for the week.
“This collective breakout in industrial metals signals larger capital flows seeking ‘gold alternatives’ [in] the debasement/dedollarization narrative,” reckons Shiels at MKS. “[But] each metal [also] has their unique demand story.
“Strong physical silver demand in India is industrial related. Resurgent Chinese platinum demand [is for] investment and jewelry. There’s a base metals restocking cycle in China [plus]
a more widely-known micro story in copper.”
With copper stockpiles available for delivery against London Metal Exchange contracts falling to 2-year lows, US copper stockpiles have doubled so far in 2025 to the most since Trump’s first-term trade tariffs panic.
Silver has meantime begun to come back out of Comex-approved storage on the US east coast after swelling by nearly 3/5ths, while US gold stockpiles have shrunk 15% from start-April’s record high after nearly tripling amid the same fears of import tariffs hitting bullion, driving Comex futures contracts sharply above London quotes and sucking in metal.
One-month lease rates for borrowing platinum in London today rose over 1 percentage point to 12.5% per annum, the highest since end-March, eve of Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ trade tariffs announcement, when precious metals in bullion form were explicitly excluded.
Silver lease rates meantime edged up to 0.5% per annum, the highest in almost 2 weeks but back down to more normal levels from the tariff panic peak of 7.5% seen in March.
Gold 1-month lease rates also edged up, but remained negative − costing the lender 0.14% per year more than they would earn in interest on the cash exchanged for the metal, implying much more plentiful London supplies.
Silver and platinum’s fellow industrial precious metal palladium also jumped in price this week, adding 7.5% to a 7-month high, more than 3 times the weekly gain in gold.
US Treasury bonds fell in contrast, pushing up Washington’s 10-year borrowing costs by 0.08 percentage points from last Friday to a 2-week high of 4.48% per annum as the better-than-expected jobs data coincided with President Trump falling out with former supporter and donor Elon Musk on social media.
