Gold price jumps above $5,300: planning and project economics notes for miners
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell

First reported on MINING.com
30 Second Briefing
Gold prices surged above $5,300/oz to a record $5,311.29, up over 2% on the day and nearly 20% year to date, as the US dollar fell to a four-year low and investors rotated from currencies into hard assets ahead of a closely watched Fed decision. The move follows bullion’s first break through $5,000/oz earlier in the week and is being driven by expectations of a more dovish, less independent Federal Reserve and heightened geopolitical risks, including US threats over Greenland and Venezuela. Silver outperformed, hitting $117.69/oz after a 2025 price doubling, prompting CME margin hikes and a trading halt in China’s only pure-play silver fund, with Citigroup now calling $150/oz within three months.
Technical Brief
- Last year’s gold price appreciation of 65% is already being challenged by the current pace.
- Dollar weakness has taken the US currency to its lowest level in four years.
- Political risk drivers explicitly cited include US threats over Greenland annexation and intervention in Venezuela.
- Bond traders are positioning for a dovish Federal Reserve stance, reinforcing the low-rate support for bullion.
- Standard Chartered’s Suki Cooper attributes current flows mainly to retail-led reallocations into gold.
- Fed decision timing is precise: 2:00 p.m. ET, with market focus on Powell’s remarks.
- CME has increased margin requirements on silver futures mid-rally, while China’s only pure-play silver fund suspended trading.
Our Take
With gold and silver dominating 284 keyword-matched pieces in our database, this kind of rapid price appreciation tends to precede a wave of marginal project restarts and reserve re‑optimisations, especially for USA- and China-linked developers with shelved feasibility studies.
Citigroup’s near-term silver price forecast and the metal’s more than 2x gain in 2025 imply that polymetallic and copper-silver projects could start prioritising silver recovery circuits in their flow sheets, even as copper fabricators report 10–30% order book declines that may temper standalone copper expansions.
The combination of strong gold and silver pricing with weaker copper order books suggests base metals projects in the Americas may increasingly lean on precious-metal by-product credits to keep all-in sustaining costs competitive in upcoming technical and investment studies.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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