Gold and silver take a hammering in major market shifts
Precious metals, oil and cryptocurrencies are among the assets suffering badly on Monday as part of a broad-based sell-off.
Monday 2 February 2026 13:24, UK
Gold and silver costs took further punishment early on Monday following the record routs seen at the end of last week.
Both precious metals had stood at record values on Thursday but fell sharply after Donald Trump revealed his nomination for the chair of the US central bank.
The announcement on Friday that he wanted Kevin Warsh to succeed Jay Powell from May calmed market nerves over Federal Reserve independence.
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This was seen to the greatest extent in so-called safe haven gold and silver prices, which suffered their worst day since 1983 and 1980 respectively by the US close on Friday night.
The declines continued on Monday, with spot gold down by a further 7%. Silver was almost 11% down after its 30% fall in the previous session.
Market analysts said this was partly due to the fact that some brokerages were increasing their margin requirements - raising the minimum amount of money investors must deposit to open or maintain leveraged positions.
Such a move during a period of volatility is generally negative for an investor's contracts and some were having to sell other assets to cover higher gold and silver margin calls.
Gold stood at $4,480 per ounce and silver at $73.94 early on Monday morning in Asia dealing but recovered some poise as the markets shifted to Europe with the day's losses substantially reduced.
Each had reached record highs of $5,594.82 and $121.64 respectively during the rally that preceded the sell-off.
Cryptocurrencies have also had a rough ride since Friday.
Bitcoin dropped below $80,000 for the first time since April during the weekend and stood at $75,142.
Brent crude oil, which was trading at $70 a barrel last week, was at $65.
The hits were reflected in stock market values in Europe after sharp declines in Asia, where the Hang Seng in Hong Kong closed the day 2.3% down.
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The FTSE 100 - home to many precious metal mining and energy stocks - was 0.5% down in early dealing but later turned positive as investors sought out healthcare and financials and gold and silver costs recovered some of the ground lost earlier in the day.
Analysts widely stated that they expected the correction for the metals to be temporary given that uncertainties continued to loom large over the global economy.
Ipek Ozkardeskaya, senior analyst at Swissquote, said many of the market shifts were being driven by the known views of Mr Warsh, including his past criticism of Fed policy decisions.
"He is expected to favour balance sheet reduction for bringing inflation down. And there is scope to shrink the Fed's balance sheet substantially!
"Before 2008, the balance sheet stood below $1 trillion, peaked near $9 trillion in 2022, and now sits around $6.5 trillion.
"That could mark the end of the era of free money for markets - and that is bad news", she wrote in a note.