Kate English

So gold is up 50% year to date.

Silver is up 70%.

Yeah, I would also say do bear in mind the two values are very, very different.

Gold is still worth an awful lot more than silver.

But I suppose it's again reflective of this wider move towards silver.

precious metals and more safe haven assets and potentially a move away from currencies and is reflective again, too, of where we have a stock market that's riding high, but there's still clearly an undertone or undercurrent of uncertainty when it comes to investors who are looking to make sure that they have money that's safe in other assets as well.

Yes.

Yeah, so what a news story to wake up to this morning.

We haven't had a wake up alarm call like this in quite some while.

And I would very much so stress that this is an unfolding news story.

When I read it, there's still a lot of questions I would have around it.

For example, the pharmaceutical tariffs.

Are they the end result of that Section 232 investigation, which was ongoing yesterday?

It's not fully clear if that is the case.

Does this apply to blocks that would have already agreed trade frameworks with the US administration, for example, the EU, where we know in the end of July, start of August, we reached that trade framework agreement of a 15% cap on tariffs, of which pharmaceuticals was under that as well.

So,

Certainly, we've come from an environment where even only a few weeks ago, the ECB at their monetary policy decision making were saying that risks were more balanced.

Why?

Because we had moved away a little bit from some of the volatility around the announcements previously.

when it came to tariffs, there were trade frameworks in place.