Spot gold closed Monday at $4,797 per troy ounce, up 0.7% on the day and within 1% of last week's all-time high of $4,841 set Wednesday. The metal is up 33% year-to-date — its strongest YTD performance in four decades and the second-best calendar year on record after 1979. Silver climbed to $42.18, platinum to $1,348, and palladium to $1,124.
World Gold Council Q1 data published last week showed 308 tonnes of net central-bank gold purchases, the highest quarterly figure since 2008. The National Bank of Poland topped the list with 28 tonnes; the People's Bank of China formally added 18 tonnes (analysts believe undisclosed buying could be 4-6x that figure); the Reserve Bank of India added 22 tonnes. Singapore, Czech Republic, Turkey and Qatar each added more than 10 tonnes.
Drivers Beyond the Iran Premium
The gold rally has progressed in three identifiable phases this year. The first leg, January-February, was driven by U.S. fiscal-debt anxieties as Treasury auctions priced at unusually wide tails. The second leg, March-April, has been Iran-war-driven safe-haven buying. The third and emerging leg is structural: a rising number of EM central banks are explicitly de-emphasizing dollar reserves, with gold replacing approximately $112 billion of incremental Treasury allocations over the past 18 months, per JPMorgan Treasury research.
Gold ETFs continue to attract inflows. SPDR Gold Shares (GLD) crossed $118 billion in AUM on Friday — a level that may yet be eclipsed by BlackRock's IBIT bitcoin ETF before year-end. iShares