If you own gold or silver right now, you probably feel smart and slightly anxious at the same time.

I’ve been following this move tick‑by‑tick, and the most striking thing is how calm Jerome Powell sounds compared with what gold and silver are actually doing.

Gold has climbed toward $5,600 an ounce after roughly a 64% jump last year, according to the Economic Times. The report also highlights Silver’s sprint toward the 120‑dollar level as investment demand, industrial use, and tight supply collide.

At the same press conference where those price moves were hanging over the market, Powell told reporters “not to take much message macroeconomically” about the significant price increases of precious metals, as highlighted in a clip posted on Cointelegraph’s X (formerly Twitter) page. 

That single line is the clearest view you’re going to get into how the Fed thinks about this metals spike.

Jerome Powell downplays the signal from precious metals.

Powell downplays the signal from gold

Shutterstock What really set people off wasn’t just that gold is at record levels. It was the way Powell tried to separate that price action from the Fed’s reaction function.

“Jerome Powell says not to read much into the rise in gold prices,” Cointelegraph captioned the clip on X during the press conference, paraphrasing his answer to a question about the metal’s surge.

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Meanwhile, the moves have been anything but minor.

Gold recently broke above $5,000 per ounce on safe‑haven demand tied to geopolitical tensions and uncertainty about future Fed policy, even before it extended toward the 5,600‑dollar region, according to Plus500.

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More Gold: The combination of rate‑cut expectations, geopolitical stress and central‑bank diversification has driven precious metals to record or near‑record levels, while sharp pullbacks remain a real threat after such a steep rise, according to CME Group analysis.

When I put those pieces together, it feels like the Fed is quietly saying, “We see it, but we’re not going to let gold bully us,” which is not the message metals traders wanted to hear.

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Schiff hears a “vote of no confidence” in Powell’s dismissal of gold price jump

If Powell was trying to calm things down, it didn’t work on the hard‑money crowd. Peter Schiff, who has been hammering the case for gold and silver for years, immediately framed the market’s reaction as a referendum on the Fed.

“I was tied up and wasn’t able to listen to the Powell press conference. But judging by the reaction in precious metals, his talk did nothing to improve confidence in the U.S. economy or the dollar. Gold rose over $200 per ounce and silver rose over $4,” Schiff wrote on X.

That’s the pure gold‑bug read of the day: The metals weren’t just reacting to data, they were reacting to Powell himself.

In a follow‑up X post, Schiff said “Powell basically said that the recent jump in gold is irrelevant to Fed policy. But when Greenspan was Chair he said that he watched gold closely as it was the best indicator of whether interest rates were too low or too high. How can a once‑critical metric no longer be relevant?”

His point is simple: If you stop looking at the dashboard light that used to warn you about loose policy, can you really be surprised when markets stop trusting you.

That fits with the way he’s been talking about this move more broadly.

Gold heading toward $6,000 and silver toward triple‑digit levels would reflect a looming loss of control over inflation and the dollar, according to Schiff’s forecasts cited by Finance Magnates.

Surging gold and silver are a sign that investors are preparing for a deeper financial crisis and should treat metals as core safe‑haven assets rather than niche trades, according to Schiff’s comments highlighted by Binance.

I don’t think you have to agree with his price targets to take that broader warning seriously: There’s a real constituency that believes the Fed is behind the curve and that the metals spike is the market’s way of saying so.

The gap between Fed talk and market pricing

Underneath the social‑media noise, there’s a numbers story you can’t ignore.

The Fed has kept its policy rate on hold and stressed that inflation is still above its 2% target, signaling no rush into aggressive cuts, the Economic Times noted. Futures markets are still pricing roughly 150 basis points of cuts across 2026, putting a big assumption about easier policy into gold and silver prices, according to Finance Magnates.

This hit to real yields, combined with geopolitical risk and central‑bank buying, is a major reason metals have rallied so far and so fast, according to CME Group.

That leaves you in an uncomfortable middle.

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On the one hand, Powell is telling you not to overinterpret precious metals and not to expect policy to be driven by its every tick. On the other hand, the metals and the futures curve are trading as if the Fed is already halfway down the road to easier money.

Here’s how I’d summarize what the current data and commentary imply for someone managing their own money.

  • Gold has already posted a huge two‑year gain and a massive FOMC‑day spike of more than $200, which means your forward returns are much more dependent on timing if you buy now.
  • Silver, which jumped more than $4 in a single session after Powell’s comments, according to Schiff’s X post, has been even more volatile than gold, amplifying both upside and downside swings.
  • The story is being driven by real yields, rate‑cut expectations, and faith in the Fed as much as by spot inflation.

That doesn’t tell you what to do. It tells you that if you buy here, you’re not just betting on metals. You’re betting on a specific view of how far Powell will, or won’t, move from his current stance.

How to apply the recent precious metals story to a real‑world portfolio

If I were building or revisiting a plan right now, I’d start by deciding exactly what job I want metals to do. Are you using gold and silver as long‑term insurance against inflation and political risk, or are you trying to ride a momentum wave that you hope isn’t over?

Here’s how I’d turn all of that into actual decisions:

  • If your gold and silver positions have ballooned after the latest spike, I’d seriously look at trimming back to your original allocation and locking in some gains, instead of letting a hedge morph into your biggest risk.
  • If you’ve never owned metals and feel like you “have to” after this week, I’d favor building a position slowly through dollar‑cost averaging rather than chasing a 200‑dollar FOMC‑day move in one shot.
  • If your main fear is that the Fed really has stopped paying attention to gold, the way Schiff worries, I’d lean more on gold as the core hedge and treat silver and miners as higher‑beta satellites that size smaller.

None of this requires you to predict the exact wording of the next press conference. It does require you to respect the fact that Powell has told you, in so many words, that the Fed will not treat a gold spike as a command, while a vocal corner of the market insists that spike is a verdict on the Fed’s credibility.

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