If you own gold or silver right now, you probably feel smart and slightly anxious at the same time.
I’ve been watching this move tick by tick, and the most striking thing is how calm Jerome Powell sounds compared to what gold and silver are actually doing.
Gold climbed to $5,600 an ounce after rising about 64 percent last year, according to the Economic Times. The report also highlights Silver’s sprint towards the $120 level as investment demand, industrial use and tight supply collide.
At the same press conference where these price moves were hanging over the market, Powell told reporters “not to buy too many macroeconomic messages” about significant increases in precious metal prices, as outlined in a clip posted on Cointelegraph’s X (formerly Twitter) page.
That single line is the clearest view you’ll get of how the Fed thinks about this rise in metals.
Jerome Powell plays down signal from precious metals.Shutterstock” loading=”eager” height=”720″ width=”960″ class=”yf-lglytj loader”/>
Jerome Powell plays down signal from precious metals.Shutterstock ·Shutterstock
What really set people off wasn’t just that gold was at record highs. This was how Powell tried to separate that price action from the Fed’s reaction function.
“Jerome Powell says don’t read too much into rising gold prices,” Cointelegraph captioned the clip on X during the press conference, paraphrasing his response to a question about rising gold.
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Meanwhile, the movements were absolutely minor.
Gold recently slipped above $5,000 an ounce on safe-haven demand from geopolitical tensions and uncertainty over future Fed policy, even before extending to the $5,600 region, according to Plus500.
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 rally, according to CME Group analysis.
When I put those pieces together, it sounds to me like the Fed is quietly saying, “We’ll see it, but we’re not going to let gold blow us away,” which isn’t the message metals traders wanted to hear.
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If Powell was trying to calm things down, it didn’t work for the hard-money crowd. Peter Schiff, a years-long bully for gold and silver, immediately framed the market reaction as a referendum on the Fed.
“I was tied up and couldn’t listen to Powell’s press conference. But judging by the reaction of precious metals, his speech did nothing to improve confidence in the US economy or the dollar. Gold rose over $200 an ounce and silver rose over $4,” Schiff wrote on X.
This is the pure gold read of the day: metals were not just reacting to the data, but to Powell himself.
In a later X post, Schiff said: “Powell said the recent rise in gold was irrelevant to Fed policy. But when Greenspan was chairman, he said he watched gold closely because it was the best indicator of interest rates being too low or too high. How can a once-critical measure become irrelevant?”
His point is simple: if you stop looking at the dashboard light warning you about the stop loss policy, you can be really surprised when the markets stop trusting you.
That fits with how he’s talked about the movement more broadly.
Gold moving toward $6,000 and silver toward triple-digit levels would reflect a loss of control over inflation and the dollar, according to Schiff’s predictions cited by Finance Magnates.
The surge in gold and silver is a sign that investors are bracing for a deeper financial crisis and should treat the 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 this broader warning seriously: there is a real group that thinks the Fed is behind the curve and that the top in metals is the way the market is saying it.
Beneath the social media buzz, there’s a numbers story you can’t ignore.
The Fed kept its policy rate on hold and stressed that inflation was still above its 2 percent target, indicating no rush to aggressive cuts, the Economic Times noted. Futures markets are still pricing in about 150 basis points of cuts in 2026, putting a big assumption on easier policy in 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 recovered so far, and so quickly, according to CME Group.
This leaves you in an uncomfortable position.
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On the one hand, Powell tells you not to overinterpret precious metals and not expect policy to be determined by every tick. On the other hand, metals and the futures curve are trading as if the Fed is already halfway to easier money.
Here’s how I would summarize what the current data and commentary implies for someone managing their money.
Gold has already posted a huge two-year gain and a massive FOMC day rally above $200, meaning your forward returns are much more dependent on when you buy now.
Silver, which jumped more than $4 in a single session after Powell’s comments, according to Schiff X’s post, was even more volatile than gold, amplifying both positive and negative swings.
The story is driven by real yields, rate cut expectations and confidence in the Fed as much as 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 are betting on a specific prospect of how far Powell will move, or not, from his current position.
If I were building or revising a plan right now, I’d start by deciding exactly what job I want the 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 wave of momentum that you hope hasn’t ended?
Here’s how I would turn all of this into real decisions:
If your gold and silver positions have increased since the last peak, I would seriously look at reducing your initial allocation and locking in some gains rather than letting a roof turn into your biggest risk.
If you’ve never owned metals and feel like you “have to” after this week, I’d rather you build a position slowly by dollar cost averaging rather than chasing a $200 move on FOMC days in one shot.
If your main fear is that the Fed has stopped paying attention to gold, as Schiff worries, I would lean more heavily on gold as a hedge and treat silver and miners as smaller, higher-beta satellites.
None of this requires you to predict the exact wording of the next press conference. You have to respect the fact that Powell will say, in so many words, that the Fed will not treat a gold spike as an order, while a vocal corner of the market insists that the spike is a verdict on the Fed’s credibility.
Related: A major bank revises its gold price target for 2026
This story was originally published by TheStreet on January 29, 2026, where it first appeared in the Investing section. Add TheStreet as a favorite source by clicking here.
