Gold and Precious Metals React to Iran Ceasefire News
1 Video View·Apr 10, 2026
old Market Volatility & Central Bank Buying Revealed!
Central Banks are leading the charge in buying gold, continuing a decade-long de-dollarization trend across emerging markets. While countries like Turkey swapped gold for US dollars to afford expensive oil, China has consistently acted as a dip buyer, purchasing more gold in March than they have in years.
Aberdeen Investments director of ETF investment strategy Robert Minter joins Yahoo Finance Markets and Data Editor Jared Blikre to take a deeper dive into gold's recent market action.
For ETF investors, gold's movement is fundamentally tied to Real Interest Rates (nominal rates minus inflation). We also analyze the Silver Market, which saw a sell-off twice as severe as gold's due to geopolitical conflict and high oil prices. With China producing 60% of refined silver and licensing its export, potential supply restrictions are a major risk.
We've seen gold very volatile this year and some of the biggest buyers of gold have been central banks. And this is a trend that
started 10 years ago with D dollar ization in China and also Russia but then kind of spread to emerging markets. And a bunch of
central banks around the world have participated in this over the last five years. But I understand they've been pulling back a
little bit. Well there's one in particular. It was Turkey. Turkey sold some and technically they didn't sell. They swapped gold
for U.S. dollars in euro in order to fund their economy which in an economy that imports almost all of its oil and oil products
that means that they were getting currency to buy oil at the higher prices. So not exactly a tough choice to do to buy gold for
your economy or oil for your economy or oil one. And but the interesting thing is that China actually used the sell off in gold to
buy more gold in March than they have any other months since January 2025. So there is a dip buyer even if each ETF investors
weren't until today. Yeah I'm glad you mentioned the ETF buyers because aside from central banks ETF buyers have really rocketed
this market the gold market higher over the last few years. What are the dynamics at play there because it looked like they were kind
of out of the market in March. What do you think takes them back into the market. Is it just speculation. Is it going to take the
price of gold to reach a certain level. Where do we see the ETF buyers coming in. I think some of its momentum although I wish more of
it was momentum because they wouldn't have sat out so much of the oil of the gold price rally over the last couple of years. But I
think it really they still are using the playbook that gold moves based off of real rates real interest rates. So nominal rates
minus inflation creates the opportunity cost for gold which of course doesn't have a yield. That's the benefit of it. It's the only
currency that it isn't someone else's debt. So there's no yield. But when those real yields go down it makes gold have a smaller
opportunity cost. So then gold gets bid up. Now the problem with real rates is that you have nominal rates which is just every day
and then you have the real portion of the rate that when you subtract inflation only comes out when CPI comes out. So that's once a
month. Yeah. There's a delay. And so it may have looked like real rates were rising for it and justified the selling. But it's just
because the nominal rates were moving in the inflation rate was stagnant. Interesting. So let's talk about silver. I believe you're
noting it's still licensed for export from China where there is a huge share of refined supply coming from there. And there's still an
industrial shortage. I mentioned that silver is doing well today but it just got slammed in late January and it's had a tougher time
than gold clawing back some of those losses. It certainly certainly did. It had actually twice the sell off that gold did. And that's
partially because it was an extended rally. It was a bit of a crowded trade. But half of that sell off had erased on a bounce before
this Iran war began. So the war and dramatically higher oil and the potential for true shortage that would hold back the production of
economy caused a further sell off on this metal which is cyclically exposed. And but at the end of the day you're left with
China still licenses it for export. China produces 60 percent of refined silver. So licensing it is one way to control it before you
restrict it. And we think that's a strong possibility of where to go.