If you own gold or silver right now, you probably feel smart and a little anxious at the same time.
I have been following this move closely, and the most striking thing is how calm Jerome Powell sounds compared to what gold and silver are actually doing.
Gold rose to $5,600 an ounce after a jump of about 64% 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.
In the same press conference where those price movements were hanging over the market, Powell told reporters “not to take too much of a message macroeconomically” about the significant increases in the price of precious metals, as highlighted in a clip posted on the X page (formerly Twitter) of Cointelegraph.
That one line is the clearest view you’ll get on how the Fed thinks about this metals point.
Jerome Powell lowers the signal from precious metals.Shutterstock” loading=”eager” height=”720″ width=”960″ class=”yf-lglytj loader”/>
Jerome Powell lowers the signal from precious metals.Shutterstock ·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 you don’t read much into the rise in gold prices,” Cointelegraph said in the clip on X during the press conference, paraphrasing his answer to a question about the rise of the metal.
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Meanwhile, the moves were anything but minor.
Gold recently broke above $5,000 per ounce on safe-haven demand linked to geopolitical tensions and uncertainty about the Fed’s future 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 strong pullbacks remain a real threat after such a sharp rise, according to CME Group analysis.
Putting those pieces together, I feel like the Fed is quietly saying, “We’ll 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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If Powell was trying to calm things down, it didn’t work on the hard-money crowd. Peter Schiff, who has been arguing the case for gold and silver for years, immediately formulated the market reaction as a referendum on the Fed.
“I was tied up and could not listen to Powell’s press conference. But judging by the reaction in precious metals, his speech did nothing to improve confidence in the US economy or in the dollar. Gold rose more than $200 per ounce and silver rose more than $4”, Schiff wrote on X.
That’s the pure gold-bug read of the day: The metals weren’t just reacting to the data, they were reacting to Powell himself.
In a follow-up X post, Schiff said “Powell basically said the recent jump in gold is irrelevant to Fed policy. But when Greenspan was Chairman he said he looked at 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, you might really be surprised when the markets stop trusting you.
This fits with the way he has been talking about this move more broadly.
Gold moving toward $6,000 and silver toward triple-digit levels reflect an imminent loss of control over inflation and the dollar, according to Schiff’s forecast cited by Finance Magnates.
Rising gold and silver are a sign that investors are bracing for a deeper financial crisis and should treat the metals as major 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 is a real constituency that believes the Fed is behind the curve and that the metals spike is the market’s way of saying so.
Beneath the noise of social media, there’s a story of numbers you can’t ignore.
The Fed kept its policy rate on hold and stressed that inflation is still above its 2% target, indicating no rush for aggressive cuts, noted the Economic Times. Futures markets are still pricing in roughly 150 basis points of cuts through 2026, putting a big assumption about easier policy in gold and silver prices, according to Finance Magnates.
This hit to real yields, along with geopolitical risk and central bank buying, is a key reason why metals have risen so far and so quickly, according to CME Group.
That leaves you in the middle of an awkward situation.
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On the one hand, Powell is telling you not to overinterpret precious metals and not expect politics to be driven by its 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 summarize what the current data and commentary imply for someone managing their own money.
Gold has already posted a massive two-year gain and a massive FOMC-day rally of over $200, which means your forward returns are much more time-dependent if you buy now.
Silver, which jumped more than $4 in one session after Powell’s comments, according to Schiff’s X post, was 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.
This does not tell you what to do. It tells you that if you buy here, you are not just betting on metals. You are betting on a specific view of how far Powell will move, or not, from his current position.
If I were building or revising a plan right now, I would 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 won’t run out?
Here’s how to turn all this into real decisions:
If your gold and silver positions increased after the last spike, I would 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” after this week, I’d favor building a position slowly through dollar cost averaging rather than heading toward a 200-dollar FOMC-day move all at once.
If your main fear is that the Fed has really stopped paying attention to gold, the way Schiff worries, I would rely more on gold as the core hedge and treat silver and miners as smaller sized higher beta satellites.
None of this requires predicting the exact words of the next press conference. You need to respect the fact that Powell 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 a spike is a verdict on the credibility of the Fed.
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This story was originally published by TheStreet on January 29, 2026, where it first appeared in the Investing section. Add TheStreet as a Preferred Source by clicking here.