Title: Jeffrey Christian: Gold Bottom In, Price Can Spike Again This Year
Show: Investing News Network (INN YouTube channel), interviewer Charlotte McLeod
Guest: Jeffrey Christian (managing partner, CPM Group)
Date: 2026-09-12 (published; recorded 2026-09-09 - "today... on the 9th of September")
URL: https://youtu.be/GY67icoJirA
Length: 31:51
Note: YouTube auto-transcript pasted by Stephen (pasted under the title "Gold's Key Drivers, Plus End-of-Year Price Forecast"). Fillers (um/uh, stutters, contentless "you know"/"I mean") removed; wording otherwise verbatim. Auto-caption garbles corrected: Charlotte Mloud -> Charlotte McLeod, Worsh/Raj -> Warsh, Bessant -> Bessent, rural good council -> World Gold Council, Kev -> Kyiv, sensors -> [bugged] (vehicles the Russian government provided), platium -> palladium, all materialis -> albatross, world of choice -> war of choice, Juan -> yuan, loyal and Hardy -> Laurel and Hardy, viferously -> vociferously, queue -> cue. Every (mm:ss) cue kept in place.

(00:04) I'm Charlotte McLeod at investingnews.com and here today with me is Jeffrey Christian, managing partner at CPM Group. Thank you so much for being here today. Always great to have you. >> It's always great to talk with you, Charlotte. I always enjoy it. >> Me as well. And we're catching up from our last conversation back in mid-June.
(00:24) So, I thought what we could do first is start with a bit of a summer recap when it comes to gold. I believe during that conversation, you told us you're expecting gold to move sideways, but in a volatile fashion for the next couple of months before going higher and I would say largely that's what we've seen.
(00:44) So, any surprises for you with gold over these summer months? Yeah, we had expected prices to trade in a volatile sideways fashion June through August and we expected the price to start rising late August around the time of the Kansas City Fed's economics symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. And the price did move sideways like between 3,900 and 4,300 for June and July.
(01:15) But then in early August, the price started rising and we started seeing very heavy two-way gold and silver investor buying and selling. But we saw a lot of upward demand in the price and the price actually rose sharply in August where we thought it would continue that sideways motion. So by the time we got to the end of August, the price was already like $4,600 which was halfway to our year-end target. Now, it's come back off.
(01:45) It's $4,395 as we're speaking. So, it's come back off some. But the big surprise to us was that we saw investor demand pick up and push the price higher in August rather than waiting until September. >> Well, let's dig into that a little bit in that case. So what do you think was it that made investors come back into the gold market and made them get interested in gold a little bit earlier than you're expecting? >> I think it was a combination of political, economic and financial developments. So
(02:23) we have been in the position where our expectation has been we have a very hostile economic and political environment right now for traditional economics, overall economic growth and traditional investment aspects and our expectation has been and continues to be that it will get worse over the last four months of 2026 into 2027 and that will cause investors to resume purchasing gold and silver the way they did late last year and drive the prices sharply higher. And what we
(03:03) saw was that investors got nervous sooner than we thought. They thought a lot of people would be on vacation in August and that the prices would move sideways. We saw a number of military, political, economic, and financial developments over the course of August, which caused investors to start buying sooner than we had expected.
(03:28) >> And I remember the last time we talked, you weren't quite ready to say the bottom was in for gold. Do you think it's safe to say that right now? >> I think it is. I would not be surprised to see the price come off more. It still is volatile. But we saw it drop below 4,000 in the summertime.
(03:50) I don't think that's going to happen over the next several months. It might come back down toward that. We're not looking for it to go down to 4,000. So I think that the cyclical bottom's in. >> Okay. I think that helps us to understand where we're at. And you mentioned there's this confluence of factors that are working to push gold upward.
(04:16) I think one of the points that's top of mind for investors right now is the Fed meeting coming up next week. So pretty interesting scenario there. We have the Trump administration once again pushing to lower rates and we have Warsh who doesn't really seem like he's indicating he's ready to go in that direction. So I wonder if you can unpack that and what we might see next week.
(04:39) Yeah the Fed moving next week is going to be very important and before that you have US producer price index coming out tomorrow and the US CPI coming out on Friday and the financial markets are going to be jockeying back and forth and if the figures for inflation come out where they are expected, the consensus is that you're going to continue to see higher inflationary pressures and not just oil prices, but across the economy.
(05:14) That's going to lead financial markets to say that Warsh will be leaning toward a 25 basis point increase. Now, yeah, you have Trump saying, "Well, if you don't lower interest rates, I'm going to halt all foreign trade or something like that." Something crazy. But Warsh is going to be in a very difficult position if he holds interest rates flat.
(05:38) But it's going to partly depend on what happens with PPI and CPI and with interest rates over the next five days before that meeting. That meeting is next Tuesday and Wednesday. And so it kind of depends on what happens before that. But the view is that if Warsh holds, Warsh is highly unlikely to suggest interest rates decline and if he holds them flat that will be seen as him sort of paying attention to what the administration wants.
(06:14) That may or may not be the case. I would give him more credit than the markets are giving him at this point. But it's going to be very important to see what happens. And again, he's just one of like 20 people that votes on the FOMC. Obviously, he's the chairman, and a lot of people take their cue off of the chairman, but there are a number of other people who will argue vociferously that interest rates probably should be rising at this point.
(06:44) >> All right. So, very important to watch that. But we've got some data points ahead that will help us understand maybe where the Fed will be going. I wonder if you can also weigh in on what's happening in the bond market. It seems like the US government is getting increasingly concerned about what it's seeing there and not afraid to make some intervention.
(07:04) So what should investors be paying attention to there? There are several points that I would make and one of the points is yes the Treasury joining with the Bank of Japan to support the yen by selling euros and some dollars was one of those things that happened in August that caused the financial markets to start buying gold sooner.
(07:30) Another thing was the doubling up of the bond buyback, which, well, the second factor, the doubling up of the bond buyback was an indication that even Bessent and the Treasury were understanding that the financial market and the liquidity in the US economy is struggling right now.
(07:52) So they were pumping a lot of money into the economy to help support it. Now that's obviously an inflationary pressure. So you had the Treasury working to stimulate the economy which has inflationary implications while the Fed was saying wait a second inflation is being much more persistent than we would like.
(08:16) So you had this struggle between the two. And that also led investors to say, "Okay, we've got this issue." But the fact is that the Treasury realizes there are liquidity problems in the US economy and that is worrisome. The fact that we found the Bank of Japan and the Treasury engaging in a currency support effort was a little bit worrisome to me because that's a policy practice that was practiced in the 70s and early 80s.
(08:53) But by 1982, the idea that monetary authorities could intervene and turn currency exchange rates around had been largely discredited. And the view by 1982, 1983 was that monetary authorities, central banks and treasuries could support and push currency exchange rates in the directions they were headed, but they couldn't reverse them.
(09:23) So you saw basically central banks back away from currency market interventions in that period 1982 to 1985. And then once the dollar had peaked and was starting to fall in 1985, the Treasury got together with other monetary authorities and finance ministers and said, "Okay, now we can help the dollar decline.
(09:51) " And so the idea of the Bank of Japan and the US Treasury coming in to try to turn the yen around was kind of worrisome to me because it's sort of saying these guys are going back to a discredited monetary policy and it suggests that they haven't learned the lessons of the 70s. That is very interesting.
(10:15) And with that in mind, I was going to ask you if you expect to see more of this type of intervention because it seems like they've done these moves and the effects seem to be not very long lasting at all. So, any thoughts on that note? >> Well, it's hard to say. Maybe somebody will wake up and say, "Wait a second.
(10:35) What are we doing? All we're doing is giving money to investment banks and trading companies and investment firms. So, they may catch on and back away from that. But they could also persist in these failed policies and that will just make the economic and financial situation that much worse.
(11:03) >> Right. And I did want to check in and get your updated outlook on the US economy. I remember last time you talked you mentioned well we could see it go along as it has been or we could see it tip into a recession this year. So I wonder if are you leaning further into one of those directions than the other at this point? >> At this point we are saying that we think that we will see a recession at some point but probably not this year.
(11:32) The economy is showing greater strength and resilience than we had expected and a lot of other people had expected. So if you look at mainstream economists in the World Bank, the IMF, the OECD, CPM Group's projections, other banks and brokerage houses' projections, you're seeing them back away from the idea of a potential recession sooner.
(11:57) They're still saying, "Okay, we have economic problems and we're seeing signs of weakening economic activity, but we probably have enough strength in the underlying economy that will avoid a recession at least in the final four months of this year. But there's still that risk out there that at some point we will see that happen.
(12:23) I also want to bring up on the laundry list of factors that could be affecting gold, the midterm elections in the US for precious metals investors. How important are those to watch? How are you looking at that? We think the midterm elections and political issues that are surrounding it are very important not just for the US investors but because of the place of the US economy, the US dollar, US treasuries in the global economy and financial markets, I think they're very important
(13:01) worldwide. They're also very important politically and yeah we're seeing the Republican party and the administration prepare to, I mean they're working very hard to try to skew the election and they're promising that they're going to continue to push in that direction. That's very bad for the US economically, politically, socially.
(13:29) And I think the election is going to be very tight. And it's going to not be resolved in the first week of November. There's going to be arguments carrying on that will create and heighten, we already have heightened risk and uncertainties. It's going to heighten the uncertainties and risks even more.
(13:53) And it's going to unsettle people's attitudes toward the US economy, the US dollar, US treasuries. And depending on how rough it gets, it could be very beneficial for gold and silver prices and very negative for the US economy and the US just overall. Yeah, I will say this: in 2016, CPM, we were having one of our daily morning meetings and in early October of 2016, we were talking about where the market was going to head and we said to ourselves, it was Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton and we said, "Doesn't
(14:33) matter who wins, it's bad for the United States and for the world." So we structured a long call butterfly option strategy and we showed it to our clients early October, October 7th and as the election entered its final month and then election night and then the next day the gold price rose sharply and this butterfly straddle returned 125% in one month.
(15:15) So with that in mind, as much as I like to talk about history and past successes that we've had, the reason I'm talking about it is because today we are structuring a butterfly straddle based on the proposition that the election is going to be very tight and it doesn't matter if the Republicans retain control of one or both houses of Congress or if the Democrats take control of one or both houses, it doesn't really almost matter.
(15:46) Either outcome is bad for the US economy and bad for the United States government and society. So we are structuring a butterfly call to show to our clients today as we speak on the 9th of September based on the view that it doesn't matter who wins the economy is going to lose.
(16:12) >> Very helpful to know how you're approaching it and it does sound like this is going to be another factor that sticks with us longer than maybe people expect. And related to that, I want to bring up the Iran war as well, which is another one that has stuck with us perhaps longer than people were thinking that it would.
(16:30) It looks like tensions in the Middle East are intensifying. We saw oil prices back over $100 per barrel. When it comes to gold, how are you factoring that into your gold outlook right now? >> It's important to the gold outlook. It's probably not as important as one might think it was, but it is very important.
(16:52) And it's again one of those things that developed during August that we thought might take a little bit longer. And that was because the United States, again, the administration just doesn't seem to be thinking straight. The United States had the 60-day truce or memorandum of understanding in the middle of June which basically was supposed to be a ceasefire to the middle of August.
(17:21) And the Iranian government entered into that memorandum of understanding perfectly understanding that what they were doing was postponing the resumption of military violence until 60 days closer to the US midterm election. So that the US government would be continuing to have this albatross around its neck of a war of choice that isn't going the way they set.
(17:51) And if you talk to ex-military people or other people who know these things, no one that knows anything about what was going on in the Gulf and in Iran thought that this would be a five-day war the way Trump advertised it. And it's going to continue. It is continuing. It is heating up again.
(18:14) It's going to continue to be a problem for months to come. And then the residual after effects will last even longer, for years. So you have that going on. You also have the Ukraine Russian war. There's something going on in Russia. We're not quite sure what it is, but I hate to be so critical, but Steven Witkoff and Jared Kushner are like Laurel and Hardy and one of the things that they did is they flew to Russia.
(18:48) They had no plans, no proposals. Putin said talking to them was like the hole in a donut. There was nothing there. He said, "This is what Russia wants. You can go tell Kyiv to give us that." But they're making no compromises. But when they landed in Moscow, they didn't take State Department vehicles, which is protocol.
(19:13) They took vehicles that the Russian government provided which were total [bugged]. So everything that they had on their computers, anything they had on their cell phones was downloaded by the Russian government by the time they got to the Kremlin. It's just so amateurish. You can't say, are these people that, there are protocol officers in every embassy around the United States who say, "No, you don't take a vehicle that the Russian government provides you.
(19:49) You take our vehicles." It's just so bad. And so you've got the Ukraine Russia war, you've got the Middle Eastern war, you've got the United States hostility toward Canada, toward Europe. You have so many bad things going on and all of them are combining to create this environment of incredible risks and uncertainties and financial market anxieties.
(20:23) Continuing in the direction of Russia, I know on your channel you did a bit of a deep dive into what's happening there as it relates to gold, including why the Russian central bank is a seller of gold versus the global trend toward buying. So, anything further you would add there because I think this is an area where it's pretty tough to get information.
(20:43) Yeah, it is tough to get good information on all central banks and we saw how the World Gold Council has now had to walk back its second quarter data. Unfortunately for them they haven't walked back their first quarter data or the data for 2022 through 2025.
(21:04) All of which has been skewed to the wrong side, but with Russia it's very difficult. But since they attacked Ukraine in the first quarter of 2022 they had their foreign exchange assets frozen. Even assets within China where they had Chinese yuan reserves, those were frozen too because the Chinese government, the People's Bank said, with all due respect, the sanctions are such that if we trade with you we could come under sanctions. So they had the foreign exchange frozen so they have relied on
(21:47) gold transactions. When they have more money they buy gold in from refineries within Russia and then when they need more money for their government to finance the government or to finance the war effort in Ukraine they will sell gold and since 2022 you've seen them, one month they buy the next month they sell and it's been going back and forth but over the last 15 months, I think in 12 of the last 15 months, they've been sellers. They were particularly large sellers, I think, I can't remember how much, more than 2
(22:24) million ounces in the first five months of this year. Trump relaxed the oil and natural gas sanctions, trade restrictions, and so they had more money in June and they bought like 1.1, 1.2 million ounces of gold but then in July they had to sell again because they needed the cash. So the Russian government is short on cash and is having economic problems and there are economic problems that are cropping up throughout the Russian economy.
(23:01) The attacks on refineries have severely restricted oil and petrol availability. So you have petrol shortages and you have heating oil shortages throughout Russia and you have higher inflation. There are a lot of problems there within Russia. And in that environment, the central bank probably is going to continue to be a seller on net because they need the money.
(23:34) >> Well, and I guess that is what gold is there for. I want to open up the floor a little bit to you. You're always really good at helping us understand misconceptions or things that might be flying under the radar in the gold and silver market. So, anything else that you think investors might be overlooking at this time that they should be paying attention to? >> One of the points that we've been making is that with gold and silver, you have to understand they are financial assets and their prices are primarily set by
(24:05) investment demand, buying and selling by investors. There's so much money in the investment market compared to the dollar value of gold and silver supply and demand, fabrication demand. So investment demand and the financial aspect of gold and silver are very important to determining the gold price and the silver price and that's why we have record high gold prices and record high silver prices.
(24:32) But at the same time, I think investors have to be cognizant of the fact that these are physical commodities, and if you look at gold, the average all in sustaining cost for mining an ounce of gold is about 17 or $1,800 an ounce. So, at $4,300 an ounce, on average, gold miners are making a tremendous amount of money.
(24:58) And they are putting, some of them are putting that money into future exploration and development that will increase supply in the long run, not in the short run, but in the long run. And the same is true with silver. With silver, you have 75, 80% byproduct where the refining costs, once you've taken out the copper, lead, zinc, and gold, the refining cost to recover the silver, $5 an ounce or less.
(25:31) So, you have very low costs for 75% of the silver being mined. You have an enormous amount of silver in jewelry and decorative objects that can be and is being refined. You have investors selling silver, taking profits. On net investors are still net buyers, but you're having a lot of metal flow back.
(25:57) And then you have the primary producers, about 25% of the market of mine production. Their average cost is probably less than $20 an ounce. All of that combines to say in the long run, the reality of these being physical commodities will come home to roost and exert downward pressure on prices.
(26:25) That won't happen until the economic and political environment improves to the point where investors say, "I can exhale. I don't have to keep buying gold and silver or I may sell some gold and silver." So, I think that one of the things that investors need to pay attention to is because these are tangible, especially because these are tangible assets, real metal, they do have economics that will assert downward pressure on them.
(26:57) So when I see the comments on the internet about gold going to 30,000 and silver to 3,000, that's not going to happen on a sustained basis. It cannot happen on a sustained basis because these are physical tangible commodities, the supply of which will rise and rise sharply at some point because the prices have risen.
(27:22) So, we need to keep that in mind for the future for sure. I wonder if we can wrap it up as we start to come to an end here and take a look at gold prices heading into the end of the year. I wonder if you can lay out what you see coming. I know a lot of investors are wondering, all right, can we retake those all-time highs seen earlier in this year before the end of 2026? So, your thoughts on gold? We can and I mentioned the butterfly strategies that we priced and structured today.
(27:53) They have their peak profitability. We did two to show our clients. One has peak profitability at 5,000 and the other one has peak profitability of $5,400 with a timing target of mid to late, mid November. Yeah. So, we wouldn't be surprised to see gold prices spike sharply higher between now and the end of the year.
(28:19) And we wouldn't be surprised to see 80 or 90 silver either. >> That was going to be my next question. If you saw a similar outlook for silver, so maybe not those all-time highs, but a spike higher for silver, >> right? And anything you would note about platinum and palladium just before I let you go.
(28:42) I'm starting to see some amount of interest there, but it sounds like people also aren't quite sure if these are markets they should be in right now. So any thoughts from you heading into the end of the year? >> Platinum and palladium markets are tighter than they have been for some time. You have concerns about South African production.
(29:03) You have concerns about Russian exports that are positive for platinum and palladium prices. But then you also have concerns about the auto industry's demand for platinum and palladium both because of cyclical weaknesses, economic concerns, the potential for a recession and also secular changes. You have the rise of electric vehicles.
(29:28) Battery powered electric vehicles don't use these metals but there's a shift to hybrids which do use these metals and there's also a change in demographics where more people are saying I don't need a car, I can use ride sharing, I can use auto sharing, I can use rental cars and such. So there's some negatives on the fabrication demand side but overall these markets are tighter than they have been and that's been reflected in higher prices over the last 15 months. That may continue.
(30:01) We think that platinum and palladium will follow gold and silver higher, but that's a temporary type of thing. That's a short-term type move. And we would expect a lot of investor profit taking in the event of any spikes higher for both of these metals, and frankly, we tell a lot of our investors, if they're really sophisticated, we love platinum and palladium, but if they're not really sophisticated and they're not really sitting on top of the market, we tell them to focus on gold and silver.
(30:35) >> Okay. I think as usual, it depends on who you are as an investor. Well, we can wrap it up there, unless you had any final thoughts that you would want to leave investors with. As always, this has been really helpful. >> I think that probably pretty much covers the main headlines. >> Well, perfect.
(30:54) I will let you go for now. We'll hope to have you back soon to review how these interesting months ahead go for gold and silver. But thank you so much for coming on. This is great. >> Thank you for having me. >> Of course. And once again, I'm Charlotte McLeod with investingnews.com and this is Jeffrey Christian with CPM Group. Thank you for watching.
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