Central banks bought a net 41 tonnes of gold in May 2026, led by Poland’s 18 tonnes and China’s 10 tonnes, with China now holding 2,331 tonnes and 89% of surveyed reserve managers expecting global official gold holdings to rise further. In China’s domestic market, the Huaan Yifu Gold ETF has become the country’s largest ETF at about 90 billion yuan, overtaking the Huatai-PineBridge CSI 300 equity fund on 83 billion amid weak equities and constrained capital outflows. In London, Citi has joined HSBC, ICBC Standard Bank, JPMorgan and UBS as the fifth clearing member of London Precious Metals Clearing Limited, gaining Loco London settlement access to the roughly $160‑billion‑a‑day OTC bullion market.

Molybdenum’s price surge to about $65,500/t in May 2026, nearly $30/lb and up 48.9% year-on-year, signals a shift from simple by-product tightness to a security premium on alloying metals as China’s February 2025 export controls on tungsten, tellurium, bismuth, indium and molybdenum inject licensing risk into defence, aerospace and tooling supply chains. Partial substitution away from tungsten via molybdenum carbides, Mo-bearing steels and superalloys is driving small absolute but material demand gains in a roughly 300,000 t/y market, where supply is constrained by copper mine plans. Chile and Peru already export about US$2.48 billion and US$1.65 billion of molybdenum respectively, with higher prices materially improving copper by-product credits and project economics.

Copper tailings reprocessing is framed as a near‑term supply solution, with S&P Global projecting demand rising from 28 million tonnes in 2025 to 42 million tonnes by 2040 while new copper mines take an average 17.9 years to reach production and are expected to meet only about 70% of 2035 demand. Andrew Dennan, CEO of Halo Minerals, points to advances in flotation, leaching and fine‑particle recovery and to projects such as Halo’s Playa Verde in Chile, where 250 million tonnes of historic Potrerillos and El Salvador tailings at Chañaral could be reworked. With an estimated 282 billion tonnes of tailings globally, he argues that above‑ground material, already blasted and crushed, can be rapidly mobilised using existing infrastructure while also remediating legacy arsenic‑rich pollution.