Gold lost $150.10 and silver 5.85%: the worst session this tape has recorded

§1Four marks read again this morning, and none of them moved.

This desk re-read all four metals on Kitco at press time this morning and wrote nothing back, because nothing had moved. Gold reads $4,454.40 the ounce, silver $66.253, platinum $1,819.00 and palladium $1,405.00, each identical to the 05:00 mark the tape desk filed. Today is Saturday, spot metal does not trade until Sunday evening, and Kitco's board carries an internal timestamp of 13:00 New York time on Friday across all four. These are Friday's last prints, read live today and confirmed unchanged, not a new session. The marks they replace are Thursday's: gold $4,604.50, silver $70.37, platinum $1,883.00 and palladium $1,381.00.

§2Worst on the record, and not close.

Measured against those, gold fell $150.10, or 3.2604%, and silver $4.117, or 5.8507%. This paper's tape has carried a daily mark of record for all four metals since 5 August, twenty-three sessions, and neither fall has a close rival in that record. The next-worst gold session on the tape is 27 August at 0.9259%, so Friday is 3.52 times worse than anything before it. The next-worst silver session is 19 August at 2.89%, and Friday is 2.02 times that. Silver set the tape's high-water mark of $70.37 on Thursday and gave 5.85% of it back on Friday, which is a record and its reversal on consecutive days. Gold's own high-water mark, $4,643.90 on 24 August, now sits $189.50 or 4.0806% above where the metal stopped.

§3Named in Wyoming, priced in New York.

The cause was named in Wyoming and is not in dispute. Federal Reserve chair Kevin Warsh used his first Jackson Hole keynote on Friday to say that better summer readings on the PCE and CPI indices did not tell him underlying inflation had improved. "Otherwise, we have work to do." He said more than half of the items tracked in the PCE have risen above 3% over the past year, against 32% in the twenty years before the pandemic and a post-pandemic peak of 77%.

The market read a rate rise back into September: CME Group's FedWatch tool moved from about 35.5% the day before to 57.5% after the speech, on the Motley Fool's reading of it. Gold pays no interest, and a metal that pays no interest is repriced by the expectation of a higher one. An outside report earlier that morning had gold steady near $4,650 and December futures opening at $4,656.

§4The width of the day, and one outside disagreement.

The width of the day is the part a bench should carry. On Kitco's own board Friday's range ran $4,444.80 to $4,629.10, which is $184.30, or 4.146% of the low, and the metal finished $9.60 above the bottom of it and $174.70 below the top. Silver ran $65.998 to $71.230, a range of 7.928% of the low, and stopped 25.5 cents off the bottom. Palladium is the exception in every direction: up $24.00 or 1.7378% on the day, in a range of $1,304.00 to $1,492.00, and carrying a $40.00 bid-ask spread that is 2.847% of its own bid against gold's 0.0449%, sixty-three times wider. One outside divergence is disclosed. On platinum, TradingEconomics read $1,833.60 against Kitco's mid of $1,824.00, a gap of 0.526%, while CNBC at $1,820.15 agreed with Kitco; the tape is written at Kitco's bid on the two pages that agree, and the odd reading is printed here rather than dropped.