Central banks added a net 20 tons to global gold reserves in May, marking a slight increase from April, though the broader pace of accumulation remains tempered. The National Bank of Kazakhstan led the activity with seven tons of purchases, followed by Turkey and Poland at six tons each. Singapore’s MAS reported a five-ton reduction. 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, everyone. I’m Vince Lancey and this is the Gulfix Market Rundown.

Thank you for joining or watching. It’s Monday, 826, running a little bit late. We have mostly catching up over the weekend and what to look for in terms of priorities this week. And, of course, we’ll go through the markets. There’s the home page. We had nine stories out over the last three days and all of them were on topic. You pick what you want to read. There’s a lot there. Ten year yields are up one. The dollar is up 41. S&P 500 is up 28. The VIX is unchanged. Big gold is down 33%.

Silver is down one and a half percent. 57 cents. Copper is down a percent as well. WTI of 46. Natural gas down. Bitcoin down. Palladium down. Platinum down. Old silver up. And all the grains are down. Corn getting shellacked. Popped. I don’t know what you’d call it, but it’s not good. Okay, so describing the drivers of this market today, it’s a mixed bag. So we’ll cover that in the news itself. But there’s the front page. Let’s go right to the stories. What we’re going to be talking about today is what happened over the weekend, the key event to look forward to this week if you’re trying to handicap events, and a new report by the World Gold Council showing a surprising uptick in central bank gold purchases.

So we’re going to start that right now. First, over the weekend, right, those were the drivers we were talking about. The big thing was Trump signs the one beautiful big bill. President Trump signed OBB into law, while Elon Musk launched the America Party with a focus on freedom, fiscal discipline, and tech. The party seeks influence in Congress despite the entrenched two-party system. The bill, we have that covered extensively in terms of the effect it has on markets, as well as our deficit in the Hartnett post, which was very popular this weekend. Next, over the holiday, OPEC increased output.

Global equity markets opened softer. They’re higher now. After last week’s highs, a bread crew dropped to $66. It’s backed up now following an unexpected OPEC plus production hike of 555,000 barrels per day. Above forecast, as the group seeks to reclaim market share. Keep in mind that the Saudis have all the excess capacity, relatively speaking to their partners in OPEC, so they can pump more anytime they want. Now, moving forward, what we have to look forward to this week, there’s really not a lot to look at except for the one thing, and I think the markets will key on that a lot.

And that’s the tariff negotiation deadline on July 9. The US July 9 deadline for tariff agreements is driving market focus, with duties set to take effect August 1 for countries without deals. India, Japan, and the EU are still in talks, but tensions are rising, especially with Europe. Escalating trade tensions and retaliation are also in the news. The US is threatening 17% tariffs on EU food exports and 10% on BRICS-aligned countries. China is also retaliating against Europe, believe it or not, because of the car debate they’re having. Before I read the next one, 10% BRICS-aligned countries.

That’s a long way from 100%. Matt O’Reilly noted that this morning when Trump said he would threaten 10% on BRICS-aligned countries undermining the dollar, et cetera, et cetera. Well, about three months ago, maybe two months ago, Trump said it was 100%. So whether you think Trump is backing off or not, it certainly looks like he is, I’m noticing a pattern in his behavior and his actions versus the headlines. His headlines are less tariff oriented. He doesn’t want tariffs in the news. The word tariff, do a search for it. It’s dropping. Conversely, while his talk of tariffs in the news as a bragging point has slacked off and his numbers publicly seem like he’s giving up, his conversations privately are yielding tougher numbers than I thought that we would see.

So here’s what I mean. First of all, let me get to that. That’s Vietnam I’m talking about. But right now, Trump may not extend the tariff ceasefire as markets hoped. Vietnam deal kind of sucked for Vietnam, I wrote. So he’s seemingly hardlining things a little bit more. So when he comes out and says, as he has recently, I may extend and may not, as opposed to saying, I’m going to, you know, hammer people that like the tariffs are coming back. He’s not threatening the tariffs in the news anymore. He’s soft pedaling.

And I think he doesn’t want a big downtick in stocks, which came along with a popularity hit. So if you are pro Trump’s policies, and his approach, take heart to this, he’s talking soft publicly and negotiating tough. That’s what Vietnam is telling me. If you’re not happy with Trump’s policies, well, he’s backing off. So we’ll find out which of those sides of the coin is right on July 9. If he extends them, if he doesn’t extend them, chances are, they’ll be extended in some form, maybe in a case by case basis.

Who knows? But moving on to the next story, which I think is pretty important. That is, there was a surprise uptick in May central bank gold vine. Central banks added a net 20 tons to global gold reserves in May, marking a slight increase from April, though the broader pace of accumulation remains tempered. That’s the World Gold Council. But it wasn’t a slight uptick. It was surprise uptick. They expected that trend to continue lower. So I think the wording here is a little bit throwing water on a gold rally. I don’t think they’re phrasing it realistically.

It doesn’t have to be bullish, but it’s not bearish. The National Bank of Kazakhstan led the activity with seven tons of purchases, followed by Turkey and Poland at six tons each. Singapore’s MAS reported a five ton reduction. Okay. It’s probably because they were selling it to China. I’m not joking about that. There’s a chart. Central banks continue their broad accumulation of gold in 2025. The next part of that is HSBC. Oh, wrong chart. HSBC signals there’s more buying to come. According to HSBC’s 2025 central bank gold reserve survey, 43% of central bankers expect their own institutions to raise gold holdings, with 95% forecasted broader reserve growth.

OMFIF’s global public investor 2025 echoed the trend, with 32% projecting increased gold purchases in the next 12 to 24 months. So the first paragraph is, yeah, they’ve been backing off, but the backing off is not as backed off as they’ve been saying. I’m not trying to pump it up. I’m just telling you how it is. They err conservatively. Over the weekend, we had that many posts. I’m not going to go through all of them, but I want to give you a one line summary in case you have interest, as many people have.

Hardnet, we just got a bigger bubble. That’s the effect of Trump’s bill and budget passing and how it shows a pivot from Doge isn’t going to work, so I’m going to spend more. Second, why is China acquiring gold so discreetly? One word, one sentence answer, they’re not done buying. They want it cheap to buy more. That’s a response to a Ross Norman piece, which implicitly asked the question, why are they buying so discreetly, even sneakily, if that’s a word, if you can imagine it. The next piece, that’s the piece we featured over the weekend.

China will be the world’s gold trading hub soon. That’s basically empirical evidence that COMEX is dying. So if I put the title, COMEX is dying and China is growing, that would probably be the most popular poster over the weekend. But that’s effectively what we’re saying there. COMEX is dying, China is taking center stage. I might change the title to that. Turkey has $211 billion in untaxed, unseen and untracked gold. Pretty cool culturally to look at that. And there’s a bunch of other ones there. But I want to just for a second, mention the JP Morgan stablecoin analysis.

As gold people, you may not be focused on that. And I understand that. But you should be. Because that’s where the puck is going to be. What do I mean? If gold is the cure to what ails us about money in the world, hard money, soft money, crappy money, then stablecoins are the delivery mechanism of that goal. Gold is the medicine we need to take. Silver, Bitcoin, anything but fiat is the medicine the world needs to take to get more responsible. The form that it’s going to be digested and consumed more easily by the world is stablecoins.

The pill that has the medicine in it, the pill is a stablecoin. If you were interested in making money on an asset, you’d want to know who was using that asset. Well, stablecoins are an industry that will be hoarding gold for crypto use, whether it’s real or not. It’s not the point. It’s more real than ETFs. If you want to know how much gold is being bought, wouldn’t you want to know who’s making the delivery of the gold? Stablecoins become a vault for gold going forward. Just saying it’s going to be a big deal.

Picture a money market that you get 4% in, but it’s also tied to gold. That’s what stablecoins can be if they’re used properly. So it’s in our interest to know how stablecoins will be put in effect. On top of that, that analysis is very heavily focused on Hong Kong. Hong Kong is really coming out of the box on stablecoins. What else is Hong Kong doing? They’re adding to their vaulting for gold. Gold vaults, gold in the vault, stablecoins, the cure, the delivery mechanism. That’s it. So I would say if you’re interested in where we’re headed, you want to learn a little bit more about stablecoins.

Coming this week, we have a special report. We’ve seen a special report on student loan defaults. Something like 45% of Americans have student loans, and a big portion of those might default. Korea’s gold trading volume explodes, buy silver, sell platinum, says the bullion bank implicitly, but we’re right in saying that. And HSBC, a lot of people are talking about, not a lot, but it’s been touched on. HSBC says gold’s going to back off. Citi has said it, HSBC jumped on it, and you see these little newswire items, but no meat on it.

So we’re going to drill down on that report. We just got a copy of it, and we’re going to tell you why they say gold momentum is gone, and what the implications are going forward. Mind you, you’re also seeing simultaneously at other news sites, I think I saw one on Kiko, that HSBC has also said simultaneously that their affluent client base is buying a lot more gold than they had in the past. So six in one, negative six in the other, you figure it out. All right, so data on deck, Fed minutes this week, July 9th is the one that matters.

That’s the important day, Wednesday. And in premium, we have the WGC central bank buying upticks in May analysis for you. I’m Vince, no charts today, running late, got to get it out of there. Catch you later. Well, thank you, Vince, as always, for keeping us posted on everything that is going on in the precious metals world. And thank you at home for watching. I sure hope you enjoyed that and appreciate you spending part of your day here. And before we wrap up, I did want to thank Dolly Varden Silver, who kindly sponsored today’s show.

And it’s nice this week, I am at the Rick Rule symposium in Boca Raton, where Dolly Varden and CEO Sean Kunkin, as well as a couple of the other great members of their team are there, which is certainly good timing. Obviously, in addition to the rising silver price, you also have the Dolly Varden has been increasing their land package also out drilling and really has made a lot of progress in these past couple of years since Sean took over. And for quick word on how things are coming along What we did going back in April is we decided to list our shares on the NYC American.

And we did that because there are only 10 companies on the New York Stock Exchange that are giving investors exposure to silver. And now Dolly Varden is one of those companies. So we’re open to the biggest buy balls and more buyers and more investors come into the company. The share price lifted and we took our shares that had gone up and we use them to buy depressed assets, to buy assets for pennies on the dollar. And we went and these junior companies that are out there in the world, they’re it’s very tough times, very, very, very tough times for the juniors.

And we’ve been very fortunate that we’ve had some very supportive, large institutional shareholders, people like Eric Sprott that have come and supported our business. Heckler Mining has been a big supporter of our business. And so through that shareholder support, you know, we have gone out and we’ve done exploration, we’ve made discoveries, we’ve gotten very, very active, acquiring these incredible past treasures, and, you know, some of the richest silver mines in Canada. Well, thank you, Sean. Really nice to see what you guys have been moving forward and hear a little bit more from Sean from our last call where he gave a really good overview of what they’re doing at Dolly, how things are going.

We’ll just see what we can do. [tr:trw].

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