🔥 Gold Heats Up Again as Inflation Cools

The timing set-up — CPI cooled 90 minutes before Warsh testified

• June's inflation report hit at 8:30 ET; only 90 minutes later Kevin Warsh sat before the House Financial Services Committee for his first testimony as Fed chair and promised lawmakers he would return inflation to 2%.
• Prins' caveat: central banks "cannot control supply chains or stop global conflicts," so she doesn't assume he can hit the arbitrarily-set (2012) 2% target — but lower oil prices had already done part of the work for him mathematically.

June CPI — the largest one-month drop since April 2020

• Headline CPI fell 0.4% m/m, the largest one-month decline since April 2020, while the annual rate dropped to 3.5% from 4.2% in May.
• This is the moment Prins had pointed to for weeks: the spring inflation spike was an oil-driven story, and she argued the precious-metals selloff — triggered mostly by paper speculation and feedback-loop headlines — would break once oil rolled back over. "This is that break."

Gold reacted immediately

• Gold sold off hard early, then reversed the second the number hit, jumping about $60 to trade near $4,087/oz, up more than 2% — "how one print can lift the biggest narrative weight that has sat on gold and silver since the Iran War began."
• The rate scare that drove the paper selloff is also fading: the CME's FedWatch tool now puts the odds of a Fed hold at 86%.

Again, it was a paper selloff

• The drop in gold and silver over the past few months "was never about waning physical metal demand" — it was headline-induced and exacerbated by a deep paper market. Gold ETFs shed roughly 50 tonnes in H1 (~$2.7 billion in redemptions) while the physical side "did not budge."
• The pattern was more acute in silver: about 49 million shares of the largest silver ETF changed hands in a single late-June session, against a metal the world mines at only ~820 million ounces a year. "Paper can reprice in seconds. But a mine takes years to come to fruition. The Fed cannot print an ounce, speed up a smelter, or make a central bank stop buying" fiat diversification.

Underlying buying and supply deficits grew

• Central banks bought an estimated 244 tonnes of gold in Q1 — more than the prior quarter and well above the five-year average — with a record 47% planning to add more over the next year (following >1,000t/yr in 2022–24 vs a decade-earlier ~470t average).
• Private buyers pushed total gold demand past 5,000 tonnes for the first time in 2025, bar/coin buying near a multi-year high. Yet deficits remained: silver is in its sixth straight annual shortfall (95Moz short in 2025 alone); copper is forecast >500,000 tonnes short this year and two million tonnes short by 2030.

Discoveries dried up — and the majors are buying what they can't build

• Major new discoveries have "seemingly dried up," and the average time from discovery to first production now runs about 18 years, up from six in the 1980s.
• "When metal cannot be found or built fast enough, buyers invest in the companies that already hold it, or can source solid junior projects" — which is why the majors spent into a roughly $139 billion mining deal wave last year, the busiest since 2011.

The $6,000 path is intact — and a Founders+ Quarterly is next

• The structural path toward $6,000 gold "is still intact," and the spring handed patient buyers a discounted opportunity to buy physical gold and miners — "the same holds true for other metals and junior developers."
• Prins teases the next-day Founders+ Quarterly: a deep dive into the supply squeeze, the mining companies positioned across gold, silver, copper and critical metals, and the key dates to watch. Those specific picks are gated and are not captured here.