Welcome back to our weekly update. I'm Charlotte Mloud with investingnews.com and we're going to run through a few of this week's biggest stories in the mining industry. If you like this video, don't forget to subscribe to our channel, hit the like button, and of course, leave us a comment below. Let's get into it. The gold price surged this week, rising to yet another new all-time high of more than 3160 per ounce ahead of tariff updates from US President Donald Trump. The yellow medal's latest move


follows a strong Q1 during which it continually hit new records amid widespread uncertainty and achieved its best quarterly performance since 1986. However, Trump's April 2nd tariff announcement took some of the wind out of gold sales. While the precious metal showed resilience on April 3rd, rebounding back above 3100 after falling below that level, it lost ground on April 4th, finishing the day just below 340. Major US indexes have also taken hits. The S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial Average, and Nasdaq Composite have all


seen steep declines this week. There's still much uncertainty surrounding tariffs, but here's what we know at this point. After declaring a national economic emergency, Trump has put tariffs of at least 10% on all countries. Higher tariffs have been levied on about 60 nations that have large trade deficits with the US and have been deemed the worst offenders. While Trump has called the tariffs reciprocal, that's not exactly how they panned out. A tariff calculation formula published by the White House indicates


that the math involves taking the trade deficit for the US in goods with a particular country, dividing that by the total goods imports from that country, and then dividing that number by two. An explainer from the BBC shows how the formula works for the EU, where the US has instated a 20% tariff based on what it believes the EU charges. The situation becomes more complex for countries like China, which already had a 20% tariff in place from the US. Trump has now added a further 34% tariff, bringing the total rate for China to


54%. Canada and Mexico, which have also already faced tariffs from the US, avoided further charges this week. While Trump's new tariffs are sweeping in nature, there are exclusions. Among them are steel, aluminum, copper, pharmaceuticals, and semiconductors, as well as bullion, which includes gold, plus energy and other certain minerals not available in the US. The news that gold won't face levies is reportedly cooling its flow from London to New York. In recent months, traders have been rushing to bring the metal into the


US ahead of potential tariffs. With this week's clarity, the transfers no longer appear necessary. A section 232 investigation into copper tariffs is still ongoing. Trump has referred to April 2nd as liberation day, saying that tariffs will help reinvigorate the US manufacturing industry and help the country grow. However, there are widespread concerns that the tariffs will boost inflation in the US, putting pressure on Americans who are already struggling. Let's take a look at it from both angles. Here's Keith Weiner of


Monetary Metals explaining three ways tariffs could push consumer prices up. But more importantly to the inflation picture, if inflation is defined as an increase in consumer prices and you've forced them to manufacture in a high cost jurisdiction with much higher regulatory costs and then deported a lot of labor to drive up the price of labor even more, then you're going to find consumer prices have one two punch. The third punch is what is everybody's solution from from a monetary policy


perspective to inflation so-called hike the interest rate which means hike the cost of financing new factories and hike the cost of putting automation but every factory is in a given place in time in terms of how much automation they have and very few factories are 100% automated you know the idea of a lights off factory where it's 100% automated is a is a holy grail that I don't think really exists yet And every company when faced with massively increased demand for labor and massively higher labor,


you know, is going to want to want to automate more. Well, the cost of financing the automation is going to be hyped. So, what we're going to see is just one, two, three punch for you forces pushing up uh consumer prices and two of them aren't monetary. Not everyone takes the same view. Here's how Jim Thorne of Wellington Aldis explained the relationship between tariffs and inflation. tariffs slow growth one. So that's why we've been talking about a growth scare. Uh we'll


have a balance sheet recession in Canada. Uh we will have a a a slow growth period in the United States. What tariffs do is they change the relative prices in an economy. They don't change the general price level. And so no, they're not inflationary. and and and Tiff Mlin knows that and and J Pal knows that because that's third-year macro. I'll leave the links to the full interviews with Keith and Jim in the video description. Definitely check them out if you haven't already and let us know


in the comments if you think tariffs are going to be inflationary. Thank you for watching. If you like this video, make sure you hit the like button and subscribe to our channel. We'd also love to hear your thoughts, so leave us a comment below. [Music]