Gold prices mark strongest quarter in four decades as Trump sends stocks plummeting again

Gold prices hit new record highs across all major currencies on Monday, setting up for the strongest quarterly gain in more than 38 years in US dollar terms, while global stocks fell after a weekend of warnings about trade tariffs and Ukraine-Russia talks from President Trump, writes Atsuko Whitehouse at BullionVault.

 Declaring himself “angry” with Russian President Putin while threatening “big, big trouble” for Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, “You would start with every country,” Trump told reporters about the “Liberation Day” import tariffs he promises to unveil Wednesday, rather than targeting only nations with the largest trade surpluses with the U.S. This contradicted both Trump’s own hint of concessions for some nations last week and also Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s stated focus on the “Dirty 15” — that percentage of the world’s economies that apply substantial tariffs and other trade barriers to U.S. exports, and which together account for “a huge amount of our trade volume.” “The [tariff] announcements keep changing, but what they have in common is that they are not good for growth globally,” says Charles De Boissezon, global head of equity strategy at French bank Societe Generale. “This continues to increase the attractiveness of gold,” says Daniel Hynes, chief commodities strategist at Australian bank ANZ. With the US stock market on track for its worst quarter since the inflationary crash of Q3 2022, Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 fell more than 4% to its lowest level in more than 6 months, while Europe’s Stoxx 600 index was down 1.8% at midday Monday.

By contrast, physical gold rose as much as 1.4% to a new all-time high of $3,127 per troy ounce in London, after posting the 19th new daily gold price record of 2025 to date at the benchmark auction on Friday afternoon. The yellow metal rose 1.9% last week to trade 17.7% higher for the first quarter of 2025. This marks the largest quarterly price increase since the third quarter of 1986, when gold rallied more than 22% amid slowing global economic growth following the previous year’s Plaza Accord, which was implemented to weaken the strong dollar by raising interest rates in other major economies. Gold bullion has only risen 10% or more in four quarters out of the past 10 years, including this one. Outside of gold, "fears of new announcements as early as Wednesday are creating a gloomy atmosphere on stock markets around the world," says another stock analyst. Oil rose 0.4% on Monday, extending last week's 2.0% gain in Brent futures—the European benchmark—after Trump announced a secondary tariff on countries importing crude or petroleum products from Venezuela. He also threatened to apply that to buyers of Russian energy because he is "pissed off" at Vladimir Putin for dragging his feet on talks on a ceasefire with Ukraine. The price of silver, a metal Mainly industrial, fell to $34.09 per troy ounce, erasing an earlier 0.9% gain on what some on social media are calling #silversqueezeday, in an attempt to repeat the #silversqueeze meme from early 2021 that briefly pushed prices higher.

Atsuko Whitehouse is Head of the Japanese Market at BullionVault and editor of Japanese GoldNews.