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Copper joins gold in broad commodities sell-off. There’s a worrying reason behind it

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Workers roll up copper rods made from recycled copper at a metal melting facility in Yuexi County, central China’s Anhui Province, Friday, July 11, 2025.

Feature China | Future Publishing | Getty Images

Prices for metals fell sharply across the board Thursday as investors worried about the impact rising oil prices due to the U.S.-Iran war will have on the global economy.

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Gold fell nearly 6%, while silver was off 8%. The sell-off extended beyond just those two, as industrial metals like copper and palladium came under pressure, declining 2% and 5.5%, respectively. 

While the selling intensified on Thursday, gold and silver have been falling since the war in Iran began, despite the former being viewed as a safe-haven asset. Surging oil prices have created concerns that inflation will reignite and keep interest rates higher. Higher rates weaken the appeal of the bullion, which is non-yielding. 

A stronger dollar as a result of the higher rates has also weighed on gold, as it cheapens the metal.

“The risks to inflation taking away the Fed rate cuts that were priced in, and seeing interest rate increases across the world, and real rates rising, that has been the drag on gold,” said Peter Boockvar, CIO at One Point BFG Wealth Partners. The U.S. 10-year Treasury yield at one point on Thursday crossed 4.300%.

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@GC.1 v. @SI.1 since Feb. 27, 2026.

Meanwhile, copper and palladium, after declining at the onset of the war, stayed relatively stable.

But that has changed as growth concerns begin to weigh on these industrial metals. 

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Recession risk

Industrial metals are used in practical ways. Copper, for example, is in everything from electronic devices to electrical wiring and plumbing systems. A decline in copper prices is normally viewed by the Street as a sign of slowing economic growth. 

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@HG.1 v. @PA.1 since Feb. 27 2026 chart.

Wall Street consensus has generally been that the longer the war goes on, the greater is the risk that oil prices remain elevated for long enough that it alters the spending habits of consumers and businesses and leads to a recession

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It’s the “demand destruction” phase of an energy shock that traders and investors are chattering about.

“On the industrial metal side… people are now really worried about the recession risks,” Boockvar said. 

And slower growth combined with higher inflation is a “stagflation” scenario. But while investors begin to make “stagflation” trades, others see the possibility as extremely unlikely.

Ed Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research, wrote in a Tuesday note that “oil shocks are less likely to trigger the kind of sustained stagflation seen in the past, particularly during the 1970s,” referencing the economic consequences of the 1973 OPEC embargo. He noted that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, while it caused an oil shock and higher inflation, didn’t lead to a recession. 

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It’s a belief that Fed Chair Jay Powell repeated in a press conference on Wednesday. “I would reserve the term stagflation for a much more serious set of circumstances.”

While Boockvar thinks the war needs to end for industrial metals’ prices to stabilize, he said gold can likely recover as focus returns to countries’ rising debts and deficits, which gold typically does well against as a “debasement trade” play. He added that those deficits might only worsen due to military spending on the war. 

And even if stagflation does arrive, head of asset allocation research at Goldman Sachs Christian Mueller-Glissmann wrote in a Thursday note gold is a play in that environment.

“In case of a continued stagflationary shock, especially if real yields are declining, we would expect more support for Gold prices due to investor demand for real assets and FX diversification,” he wrote.

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Crypto Clarity Act inches toward Senate hearing as lawmakers weigh legislative trades

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Citi (C) says CLARITY Act momentum builds, but DeFi fight could stall crypto bill

The negotiation to get a crypto market structure bill through its next stages in the Senate have hovered over an almost-there status for weeks, and Republican lawmakers met on Thursday to figure out how to bridge the final gaps.

The White House was expected to get some updated legislative language on Thursday, reflecting the ongoing work on the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, according to people familiar with the situation. But the talks are still going, and even if the previously uncertain senators (such as Republican Thom Tillis) become satisfied with the bill’s stablecoin yield treatment, other distinct compromises (such as the approach to decentralized finance) also need to be secured before the Senate would be able to send the crypto industry’s top policy priority to President Donald Trump for a signature.

The longstanding debate that had focused on stablecoin yield — on which bankers and crypto businesses have been divided over the structure of stablecoin rewards programs — is close to a finish, the people said, though lawmakers have been discussing what else the community bankers might be offered to get their support while resolving some of their other priorities. That could include some unrelated provisions tied to Congress’ recent housing legislation, according to reporting from Politico.

Officials from Trump’s administration were said to be involved with the meeting of Republican members of the Senate Banking Committee, which is the second panel that needs to advance the bill before it would be repackaged into a final version that can get a vote of the overall Senate. Even if the effort advances from the committee by the end of April, as Senator Cynthia Lummis predicted this week, a couple of further hurdles may be out of lawmakers’ hands.

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Democrats involved in the talks have said they still want senior government officials and lawmakers from profiting off of personal crypto interests — most pointedly aimed at Trump. And they want Democrats appointed to the party’s vacant seats at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission before the agency adopts new crypto rules. Those are both points that could require concessions from the White House, and crypto insiders are expecting those controversial points to be the last matters settled once the lawmakers are working on a final bill.

On the yield issue, Lummis has said that stablecoin rewards programs that steer clear of bank-line language on savings and interest may survive the compromise, insisting they’re more akin to credit-card rewards than interest from bank-account deposits.

Lummis said Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, whose opposition to a previous draft bill helped derail an earlier effort to get to a Senate hearing, has been more flexible in recent talks. The company didn’t immediately respond Thursday to a request for comment on its position.

As Congress works, the Securities and Exchange Commission spent much of the week issuing and discussing new crypto policy points, including a first-ever taxonomy that sets out regulatory definitions for U.S. crypto assets. In a CoinDesk op-ed on Thursday, Chairman Paul Atkins and the two Republican commissioners suggested they’re eager to have a new law back up the policy they’re working on.

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“Only Congress can rewrite the law, and we stand ready to work with [Commodity Futures Trading Commission] Chairman Michael Selig to implement the CLARITY Act,” they wrote. “In the meantime, we are providing the responsible regulatory approach that markets demand.”

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JPMorgan sees S&P 500 vulnerable as Brent tops $110

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JPMorgan sees S&P 500 vulnerable as Brent tops $110

JPMorgan cuts its S&P 500 target and warns investors are dangerously complacent about Iran war risks, oil above $110, and the hit to growth, earnings, and stocks.

Summary

  • JPMorgan trims its year-end S&P 500 target from 7,500 to 7,200, arguing markets are making a high-risk bet on a quick Middle East resolution.
  • With Brent crude above $110 and shut-ins near record levels, the bank warns each sustained 10% oil rise can shave 15–20 bps from GDP and cut S&P earnings 2–5%.
  • Strategists say a deeper selloff could push the S&P 500 below its 200-day moving average toward 6,000–6,200 as demand destruction and wealth effects bite.

JPMorgan became the latest — and most prominent — Wall Street institution to sound the alarm on Thursday, cutting its year-end S&P 500 price target from 7,500 to 7,200 and warning that equity markets are making a “high-risk assumption” by pricing in a quick resolution to the Middle East conflict. The downgrade, issued as Iranian strikes on Gulf energy infrastructure sent Brent crude surging above $110 per barrel, signals a growing conviction among institutional analysts that the war’s economic fallout has been systematically underpriced.

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“We believe the market is pricing in a quick end to the Middle East conflict and reopening of the Strait, giving a low probability to a potential demand hit,” JPMorgan wrote in its note. “This is a high-risk assumption given that S&P 500 and oil correlations typically turn increasingly more negative after a ~30% oil spike.”

Oil prices have surged more than 46% since the U.S. and Israel launched their initial strikes on Iran, yet the S&P 500 has fallen less than 4% — a divergence that JPMorgan’s strategists view as a sign of dangerous market complacency rather than genuine resilience. While high-risk segments such as software stocks, South Korean equities, and crypto have sold off, broad equity positioning has barely shifted, with investors hedging rather than derisking in earnest.

The bank’s core warning centers not on inflation — the conventional oil shock narrative — but on demand destruction. JPMorgan argues that if the supply disruption persists, “GDP, demand, and revenues will adjust lower through forced demand destruction.” The bank estimates that each sustained 10% increase in oil prices shaves 15 to 20 basis points off GDP growth. If Brent holds near $110, consensus S&P 500 earnings estimates could fall by 2 to 5%.

The structural supply picture compounds the concern. Oil supply shut-ins have already climbed to 8 million barrels per day — the highest on record — and JPMorgan warned that cuts could reach 12 million barrels per day, equivalent to roughly 11% of global production.

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JPMorgan Private Bank strategists Joe Seydl and Kriti Gupta laid out the transmission mechanism in stark terms earlier this week: oil sustained above $90 per barrel risks a 10–15% correction in the S&P 500, with international and emerging markets facing even larger spillover losses due to their higher sensitivity to global growth shocks. At $120 oil, the selling could intensify materially.

The wealth effect adds a secondary channel. With U.S. households holding over $56 trillion in stocks and mutual funds, a sustained equity drawdown would feed back into consumer spending — JPMorgan estimates a 10% drop in the S&P 500 could reduce U.S. consumer spending by approximately 1%. “The combined impact of persistently high oil prices and a bear market in the S&P 500 has a detrimental effect on demand, significantly amplifying the negative impact on growth,” the bank concluded.

If the S&P 500 selloff extends below the 200-day moving average near 6,600, the bank said meaningful support may not emerge until the 6,000–6,200 range. For now, with the war entering a dangerous new energy-infrastructure phase and no diplomatic off-ramp in sight, JPMorgan’s revised target may prove optimistic rather than cautious.

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SEC Interpretation on Crypto Laws ‘a Beginning, Not an End,‘ Says Atkins

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Cryptocurrencies, Law, SEC, Policies

US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Paul Atkins has clarified how the agency intends to approach digital asset regulation following an interpretative notice issued this week.

In prepared remarks for a Thursday speech at the Practising Law Institute, Atkins said that the SEC would take a different approach to digital assets than its previous “regulation by enforcement” campaign. According to the SEC chair, the agency would first focus on its interpretation of how federal securities laws apply to crypto following the signing of a memorandum of understanding with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) last week.

“[…] While the interpretation provides long-needed clarity, I should like to assure this audience that it amounts to a beginning, not an end,” said Atkins.

Cryptocurrencies, Law, SEC, Policies
Source: Paul Atkins

The agency’s interpretation, released on Tuesday, specified that most cryptocurrencies were likely not securities under federal law, with the chair telling attendees at the DC Blockchain Summit that “only one crypto asset class remains subject to the securities laws” under the agency’s interpretation: namely, “traditional securities that are tokenized.”

Atkins later clarified that digital commodities, digital tools, digital collectibles including non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and stablecoins were digital assets typically not falling under the SEC’s purview.

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Related: SEC gives go-ahead to Nasdaq for tokenized trading trial

While the SEC interpretation could significantly change how the agency approaches crypto regulation and enforcement, a market structure bill working its way through Congress is also expected to give the CFTC more authority in regulation and oversight of digital assets. The bill, called the CLARITY Act when it passed the House of Representatives in July 2025, had not been scheduled for a markup in the Senate Banking Committee as of Thursday.

White House meets with US lawmakers behind closed doors

A spokesperson for Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis confirmed with Cointelegraph that Republican senators met with White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt on Thursday to discuss advancing the market structure bill. While the Senate Agriculture Committee advanced its version of the legislation in January, concerns over how to address stablecoin yield in the crypto and banking industry have effectively stalled progress in the Senate Banking Committee.

According to Lummis’ team, the meeting was “very productive and positive,” adding that lawmakers were “99% of the way there on stablecoin yield,” and “negotiations on the digital asset portions of the bill are in a good place.”

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