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Fed sends surprise message on rising gold and silver prices

If you own gold or silver right now, you feel smart and a little nervous at the same time.

I’ve been following this move tick-by-tick, and what’s most striking is how quiet Jerome Powell’s voice is compared to what Gold and Silver are actually doing.

According to Economic Times, the price of gold increased by 64 percent last year and reached 5,600 dollars per ounce. The report also highlights silver’s sprint towards the $120-level as investment demand, industrial use and supply collide.

At the same press conference where those price moves hung on the market, Powell told reporters to “not take too much of a macro-economic message” about the significant price increase in precious metals, highlighted in a clip posted on Cointelegraph’s X (formerly Twitter) page.

That single line is the clearest view you’re going to get on how the Fed thinks about this metals spike.

Jerome Powell subtracts signals from precious metalsShutterstock · Shutterstock

What really put people off isn’t just that gold is at record levels. It was Powell’s attempt to separate that price action from the Fed’s reaction function.

“Jerome Powell says not to read too much into gold price surge,” Cointelegraph captioned a clip on X during a press conference, explaining his response to a question about the metal’s rise.

Related: Gold, silver rates reset as trade wars resume

Meanwhile, the moves have been anything but small.

Gold recently broke above $5,000 an ounce on safe-haven demand linked to geopolitical tensions and uncertainty about future Fed policy, according to Plus500, before it extended toward the $5,600-area.

Hear more:

A combination of rate cut expectations, geopolitical tensions and central-bank diversification has driven precious metals to record or near-record levels, while sharp pullbacks after such rapid growth remain a real threat, according to CME Group analysis.

When I put the pieces together, it sounds like the Fed is quietly saying, “We see this, but we’re not going to threaten gold,” which is not the message metals traders want to hear.

Related: Jerome Powell’s net worth, salary and tenure as Fed chairman

If Powell was trying to calm things down, it didn’t work on the hard money crowd. Peter Schiff, who has been hammering the gold and silver issue for years, immediately framed the market’s reaction as a referendum on the Fed.

“I was tied up and unable to listen to Powell’s press conference. But judging by the reaction to precious metals, his speech did nothing to improve confidence in the US economy or the dollar. Gold rose to $200 an ounce and silver rose to $4,” Schiff wrote in X.

That read pure gold-bug of the day: the metals weren’t just reacting to the data, they were reacting to Powell himself.

In a follow-up X post, Schiff said, “Powell basically said the recent spike in gold was irrelevant to Fed policy. But when Greenspan was chairman he said he watched gold closely because it was the best indicator of whether interest rates were too low or too high. How could a once-important metric no longer be relevant?”

His point is simple: If you stop looking at the dashboard lights that used to warn you about lax policy, will you really be surprised when the markets stop believing you?

It fits with the way he’s talking about this move more broadly.

According to Schiff’s forecast, cited by Finance Magnates, gold will move toward $6,000 and silver at triple-digit levels, reflecting the threat of inflation and the dollar losing control.

Rising gold and silver are signs that investors are preparing for a deeper financial crisis and that metals should be treated as a core safe-haven asset rather than a niche trade, according to Schiff’s comments highlighted by Binance.

I don’t think you have to agree with his price targets to take that broad warning seriously: There is a real constituency that believes the Fed is behind the curve and that a metals spike is the way the market is.

Beneath the social-media noise, there’s a numbers story you can’t ignore.

The Fed has kept its policy rate on hold and inflation is still above its 2% target, indicating no rush to aggressive cuts, the Economic Times noted. According to finance magnates, futures markets are pricing in a cut of around 150 basis points in 2026, with big assumptions about easy policy in gold and silver prices.

This hit to real yields, combined with geopolitical risk and central-bank buying, is the main reason metals have risen so far and so quickly, according to CME Group.

It leaves you in the middle of nowhere.

Related: Fidelity fund manager sends bearish message

On the one hand, Powell is telling you not to overinterpret precious metals and expect policy to be driven by its every tick. On the other hand, the metals and futures curve is trading like the Fed is already halfway to easy money.

Here’s how I summarize what the current data and commentary indicate for people managing their money.

Gold has already posted a huge two-year gain and a huge FOMC-day spike above $200, which means your forward return is highly dependent on timing if you buy now.
Silver, which rose more than $4 in a single session after Powell’s comments, has been even more volatile than gold, according to Schiff’s X post, increasing both upside and downside swings.
The story is driven by real yields, rate cut expectations, and confidence in the Fed by spot inflation.

It doesn’t tell you what to do. This tells you that if you buy here, you are only betting on metals. You’re betting on a specific view of how far Powell will, or won’t, move from his current stance.

If I’m building or revising a plan now, I’ll start by deciding exactly what I want the metals to do. Are you using gold and silver as long-term insurance against inflation and political risk, or are you trying to ride a momentum wave that you hope never ends?

Here’s how I turn all of that into real decisions:

If your gold and silver positions have ballooned since the last spike, I would seriously look at trimming back to your original allocation and locking in some gains, rather than allowing a hedge morph at your biggest risk.
If you’ve never owned metals and you feel like you “must” later this week, I favor building a position slowly through dollar-cost averaging rather than following the 200-dollar FOMC-day move in one shot.
If your main fear is that the Fed has truly stopped paying attention to gold, as Schiff worries, I’d lean more toward gold as a core hedge and consider silver and mines as high-beta satellites that are undersized.

None of this requires you to predict the exact words of the next press conference. This requires you to respect the fact that Powell told you, in so many words, that the Fed does not treat the gold spike as a mandate, while a vocal corner of the market insists that the spike is a judgment on the Fed’s credibility.

Related: Major bank revises gold price target for 2026

This story was originally published by TheStreet on January 29, 2026, where it first appeared in the Investing section. Add TheStreet as a preferred source by clicking here.

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