Category: 3. Business

Happy Friday, traders. Welcome to our weekly market wrap, where we take a look back at these last five trading days with a focus on the market news, economic data, and headlines that had the most impact on gold prices and other key correlated assets— and may continue to in the future.

Here’s what you need to know:

1. Gold prices showed volatility but ended the week higher, closing above $3355/oz.
2. Market movement was driven largely by trade war rhetoric and tariff actions, not hard data.
3. Despite hawkish FOMC minutes, gold prices held firm and continued to climb.
4. New copper tariffs heightened industrial metal volatility, supporting gold’s safe-haven appeal.

So, What Kind of a Week Has it Been?

Gold’s five-day chart has what looks like a deep sawtooth pattern up until a sharp line higher here at the end. This is misleading, however, as the yellow metal’s range for most of the week has been just $20-30/oz. While it’s a concerning realization for experienced traders who want a more concrete set of inputs to base their price projections on, this first full week of trading in July seems to have gold moving in very “vibes-based” trends.

Light Data, Heavy Rhetoric

That observation is due in part to the fact that there is a very light data calendar this week. In fact, “data” suggests more tangibility than is really there for the single major macroeconomic input we received— the meeting minutes from last month’s FOMC. The rest of the trading momentum for gold, as well as the US Dollar and other related major asset classes, was heightening rhetoric around the Trump Tariffs and still-present risk of a full-on trade war sparked by the US.

Tariff Turbulence and the Dollar

The Dollar strengthened considerably at the start of the week as traders braced for Wednesday, originally tipped to be the date that the White House’s “Freedom Day” tariffs were scheduled to take effect. This had the impact of weighing gold prices down as far as $3300/oz in Sunday evening trade, but here the metal found supportive buyers. And as the start of the US’ Monday came with early indications that the Trump Administration was ready to back down on its threats, gold found headroom again and climbed somewhat easily back to $3330 and above.

Of course, the pattern repeated itself—initiated by new and destabilizing, if vague, threats on trade restrictions— and again the Greenback’s rally tripped gold spot prices lower. This time, gold has to fall far enough to briefly test the water below support (roughly $3290) before rallying again.

Fed Minutes vs Market Momentum

Where we might have actually anticipated weakening gold prices was in the wake of the FOMC minutes, which painted a picture of the US central bankers as hardly eager to cut rates in the immediate term, especially not later this month. This is despite recent public commentary from some Fed officials (potentially angling for the White House’s good graces when Chair Powell’s term expires) to the contrary.

We looked for such a strong signal that a lower rate environment, expected to directly benefit gold investment, would weigh down on the yellow metal, but in fact, prices not only held relatively steady, but have mostly only risen since the Fed Minutes were made public.

Tariffs Hit Copper—Gold Follows

Thursday and Friday’s trading has seen gold continue to climb for now three consecutive sessions, and is looking set to close the week above $3355/oz. This is due in large part to the announcement of new tariffs imposed by the US vastly outstripping the few announcements (or even suggestions) of deals being reached with trade partners.

Gold’s climb and general feel of volatility also relates closely to the White House now directly levying tariffs in the metal commodities space with a 50% duty on copper. Copper and gold are not quite directly linked, but copper market changes often ripple through to another industrial metal—silver— which does often push or pull on the gold market with considerable force.

Next Week’s Data Watch

Next week, we get a little closer to the world of the real, at least in terms of macro data, with an updated consumer inflation print on Tuesday and Retail Sales on Thursday. Whether or not hard numbers can reassert control over the markets’ mood from the intangibility of uncertainty remains to be seen.

In the meantime, traders, I hope you can get out and safely enjoy your weekend for the next couple of days. After that, I’ll see you back here next week for another market recap.

CNN
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The chief executive of the world’s leading chipmaker warned that while artificial intelligence will significantly boost workplace productivity, it could lead to job loss if industries lack innovation.

“If the world runs out of ideas, then productivity gains translates to job loss,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria when asked about comments made by fellow tech leader Dario Amodei, who suggested AI will cause mass employment disruptions.

Amodei, the head of Anthropic, warned last month that the technology could cause a dramatic spike in unemployment in the very near future. He told Axios that AI could eliminate half of entry-level, white-collar jobs and spike unemployment to as much as 20% in the next five years.

Huang believes that as long as companies come up with fresh ideas, there’s room for productivity and employment to thrive. But without new ambitions, “productivity drives down,” he said, potentially resulting in fewer jobs.

“The fundamental thing is this, do we have more ideas left in society? And if we do, if we’re more productive, we’ll be able to grow,” he said.

The increase in AI investments, which fueled a massive technology boom in recent years, has raised concerns about whether the technology will threaten jobs in the future. Roughly 41% of chief executives have said AI will reduce the number of workers at thousands of companies over the next five years, according to a 2024 survey from staffing firm Adecco Group. A survey released in January from the World Economic Forum showed 41% of employers plan to downsize their workforce by 2030 because of AI automation.

“Everybody’s jobs will be affected. Some jobs will be lost. Many jobs will be created and what I hope is that the productivity gains that we see in all the industries will lift society,” Huang said.

Nvidia, which briefly reached $4 trillion in market value, is among the companies leading the AI revolution. The Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker’s technology has been used to power data centers that companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Google use to operate their AI models and cloud services.

Huang defended the development of AI, saying that “over the course of the last 300 years, 100 years, 60 years, even in the era of computers,” both employment and productivity increased. He added that technological advancements can facilitate the realization of “an abundance of ideas” and “ways that we could build a better future.”

Artificial intelligence is also likely to change the way work is done. More than half of large US firms said they plan to automate tasks previously done by employees, such as paying suppliers or doing invoices, according to a 2024 survey by Duke University and the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta and Richmond.

Huang said that even his job has changed as a result of the AI revolution, “but I’m still doing my job.”

Some companies also use AI tools, like ChatGPT and chatbots, for creative tasks including drafting job posts, press releases and building marketing campaigns.

“AI is the greatest technology equalizer we’ve ever seen,” said Huang. “It lifts the people who don’t understand technology.”

Fareed Zakaria’s interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang can be seen on “Fareed Zakaria GPS” on Sunday 10 a.m. ET/PT.

The dollar turned in its best weekly performance in more than four months as President Donald Trump’s latest tariff threats heightened concern that escalating trade tensions will stoke inflation and derail a rally in risk markets.

The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index rose 0.73% this week, the best showing — by a hair — since the week of Feb. 28, after falling for two weeks before that. The Japanese yen, British pound were among the worst performers in the Group of 10 this week.

Story Continues

Despite the end of solar panel tax incentives under President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, globally, solar is having a moment. The World Economic Forum reported that renewable energy capacity increased by 15.1% in 2024, with much of that driven by solar growth in China.

“Some point in the last five years or so, we crossed an invisible line where it became cheaper to generate power from the sun and the wind than it did from setting coal and gas and oil on fire,” said author and environmentalist Bill McKibben. “That’s an epochal moment in human history.”

In his upcoming book, “Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization,” McKibben looks at how the explosive growth of the solar industry could pave the way for a more climate-resilient future. McKibben spoke with “Marketplace” host Amy Scott about the book; the following is a transcript of their conversation.

Amy Scott: So why solar? Why is that a last and maybe our best chance at avoiding climate calamity?

Bill McKibben: You know, I’ve been working on climate change for a very long time, Amy. I wrote the first book for a general audience about what we then called the greenhouse effect back in the 1980s and the first hint that we’ve actually had of something that’s scaling fast enough to make even a small difference in how hot this planet gets has been the explosion in the last two years of the amount of solar power on this planet. Last year, 95% or so of new electric generating capacity came from the sun and the wind, and that’s remarkable. You can see it happening everywhere. It’s centered in China, which is building about half the clean energy on the planet. Forget petrostates, they’re now the world’s first ‘electrostate.’

Scott: I mean, it’s really remarkable. Why has this happened in just the last couple of years?

McKibben: Money, money, money. Some point in the last five years or so, we crossed an invisible line where it became cheaper to generate power from the sun and the wind than it did from setting coal and gas and oil on fire. That’s an epochal moment in human history. We really could wind down combustion quickly on this planet, saving something of the climate, preventing millions of deaths a year from breathing the bad effects of that combustion, and, not in a minor way, we could also take some of the pressure off the geopolitics of this earth. It’s pretty hard to fight a war over sunshine.

Scott: But the myth that solar is expensive is so pervasive. You write it’s considered like the full the Whole Foods of energy, but actually it’s more like Costco. Why is that so sticky?

McKibben: Well, it’s because it’s been true for 40 or 50 years. Ever since we started talking about this stuff, we’ve called it alternative energy, and that’s because fossil fuel was always, and remains, fairly cheap. But activists and government policy makers set the conditions that began to allow demand to build, and as that demand built across the world, but especially in China, people figured out how to make really cheap solar panels. There’s now parts of Europe where people are putting up solar panels instead of fences, because it’s cheaper than buying good wood. It’s only in the US where we’re, at least for the moment, determinedly turning our back on all of that.

Scott: Right? We have to talk about the 900-page Republican tax cut and spending bill known as the ‘One Big, Beautiful Bill,’ that became law and will essentially remove incentives for solar power here in the United States. How big of a setback is that for the overall energy transition?

McKibben: It’s a huge setback for the American role in that energy transition, but in the long run, it’s probably going to be at least as big a problem for us economically. We’re essentially ceding the future to the Chinese, and it’s possible that 20 years from now, the U.S. will be a kind of museum of coal-fired power plants and internal combustion engines, while the rest of the world has moved on to cheap, clean technology. That would be a great shame, and it’s not inevitable. Even with the current powers that be, there’s a lot that can be done at the state and local level to surge ahead with renewable energy, even while Washington is sticking its head as far down the sand as it can get.

 Scott: As you mentioned, China is leading the solar revolution, leaving the United States behind. You’ve been to China’s Solar Valley. What did you see there?

McKibben: Well, I’ve been to China a bunch of times and watched different phases of this, including the very early ones. The Chinese figured out early on that this was where the future lay, and that’s why now the pace at which they’re doing this is truly incredible. In May of this year, China was putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels, and a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels is the rough equivalent of a nuclear or a coal-fired power plant, they were doing that every eight hours. Can you imagine building a nuclear plant every eight hours? That’s essentially what they were doing, and they’ve coupled it, of course, with the technologies to take full advantage of all that electricity.

Scott: All this kind of makes you wonder, does the world even need the U.S. to be fully on board? Can we get to a livable climate ceiling without U.S. involvement?

McKibben: The problem is not only that we’re still second-biggest source of carbon in the world, but also that the other thing that the Trump administration is doing is trying very hard to sell our fossil fuels abroad. For the moment, we’re going to have to do this without the help of Washington. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do it. You know what state in America is putting up renewable energy far faster than any other?

Scott: I do know the answer, but yeah, it’s a surprise.

McKibben: The Lone Star state of Texas and and it’s because they understand the economics of it. That’s what’s keeping their rapidly expanding grid affordable and, probably just as importantly, reliable.

Scott: I was telling my producer before we started that reading the book is kind of an emotional roller coaster. It’s at times extremely hopeful and also very depressing. At the end of the book you write that when you finished writing your first book about climate change, “The End of Nature,” you felt catatonic. But after this book, 40 years later, you felt a combination of sadness and exhilaration. Why exhilaration?

McKibben: Well, at the prospect that there’s finally something we can do that can scale. I’m sad because of all that we’ve already lost and will continue to lose, but we finally have something that, if we decided to do it at the pace that it’s possible to do it at would get us somewhere.

Related Topics

President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign against the Federal Reserve and Chair Jerome Powell to lower interest rates entered a new front this week.

The latest line of attack comes from Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, who wrote to Powell on Thursday to call out the renovation of the Federal Reserve’s Washington headquarters.

“The President is extremely troubled by your mismanagement of the Federal Reserve System,” Vought wrote in a letter posted to X. “Instead of attempting to right the Fed’s fiscal ship, you have plowed ahead with an ostentatious overhaul of your Washington, D.C. headquarters.”

Asked by reporters Friday if he planned to fire the Fed chief, Trump said “no.” But fears persist. Trump’s attacks against Powell have been unrelenting, calling him everything from “very stupid” to insulting him as a “low IQ” person, and even saying, “I think he hates me.”

Vought, a longtime trusted Trump aide and veteran of his first term – when he served in the budget office in multiple roles – seized on testimony that Powell gave to the Senate Banking Committee on June 25, when he was asked by Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., about the Fed’s renovations. Scott told Powell that “Americans have lost confidence in the Federal Reserve since 2021.”

“During this time of hardship, the Fed has spent billions on lavish renovations to its D.C. offices. We’re talking about rooftop terraces, custom elevators that open into VIP dining rooms, white marble finishes and even a private art collection,” Scott claimed.

Powell promised the committee a detailed response in writing, before saying, “Generally, I would just say we do take seriously our responsibility as stewards of the public’s money.”

Powell then responded to each of Scott’s questions about the renovation: “There’s no [VIP] dining room. There’s no new marble. We took down the old marble, we’re putting it back up. We’ll have to use new marble, where some of the old marble broke. But there’s no special elevators. There’s just old elevators that have been there. There are no new water features. There’s no beehives, and there’s no roof terrace gardens.”

Vought, in his letter, said Powell’s testimony “raises serious questions about the project’s compliance with the National Capital Planning Act.” Just days ago, the White House appointed three new members to the National Capital Planning Committee who have direct ties to Trump and his administration.

Speaking Friday morning on CNBC, Vought further criticized Powell for building what he called “a palace” that he said would be “offensive for anyone going to the National Mall.”

But when pressed multiple times by CNBC about whether he would have posted his letter to Powell on social media if the Federal Reserve chair had expressed willingness to cut the interest rate at the July 30 meeting, Vought struggled to answer.

“The President is a builder. He’s horrified by the notion of cost overruns,” Vought said before turning his argument back to what he calls Powell’s “fiscal mismanagement of the Fed.”

Vought’s letter comes amid near-constant attacks from the president and his top aides against the central bank chief. Those attacks have also roiled markets. In April, just as Wall Street was starting to recover from a tariff-induced sell-off, Trump’s criticism of Powell sent them spiraling again.

Days later, Trump said he had “no intention” to fire Powell, and markets rose.

In May, the Supreme Court allowed Trump to fire several independent agency members but suggested that its legal reasoning would not apply to the Federal Reserve. The court noted that the Federal Reserve is a “uniquely structured, quasi-private entity” that has its own distinct historical tradition.

Powell has been asked repeatedly if he would leave the central bank if Trump asked him to or tried to fire him. “No,” was Powell’s stern one-word response in November. He has repeated the same answer since.

In early July, at a central banking conference, Powell was asked about Trump’s continued attacks. “I’m very focused on just doing my job,” he said, before adding that the only matters important to him are fulfilling the Fed’s congressionally mandated remits of full employment and price stability.

Central bank leaders in other countries and the European Union said they would be handling the pressure “exactly” as Powell has. Typically, the central banks of the European Union, U.K., Japan, Canada and Switzerland look to the Fed’s independent decisions to help guide their own.

The Federal Reserve is the world’s most important central bank. It was established to make independent monetary policy decisions and is responsible for key national functions such as distributing dollars and coins, acting as the “government’s bank,” and even processing checks. Its board members and governors typically serve across multiple presidential terms.

When the central bank makes a decision to lower, raise or keep interest rates steady, its 12-member Federal Open Market Committee votes on that decision. In theory, the Fed chair could be outvoted at any meeting if the rest of the committee disagrees with his or her views.

Interest rate decisions have wide-ranging impacts for not only American consumers and businesses but for the global economy, which is why the independence of the Fed is so important. Rate decisions could lower or raise borrowing costs for anyone who has a mortgage, car loan, credit card or personal loan.

More recently, Trump has expanded his attacks to include the committee, saying that they should be “ashamed” of current policy. “The Board just sits there and watches, so they are equally to blame. We should be paying 1% Interest, or better,” Trump said in a social media posting. Trump nominated Powell during his first term and nominated two other currently serving Fed board members as well.

“Our Fed Rate is AT LEAST 3 Points too high,” Trump said on Truth Social this week.

A large interest rate cut, like the one that Trump has repeatedly called for, would signal a financial emergency. The last time the Fed cut rates so dramatically was the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when the Fed slashed rates to near zero as the global economy came to a halt.

But the Fed remains on hold, thanks to Trump’s own dizzying array of tariffs. Powell said earlier this month that the Federal Reserve would have cut rates by now if Trump’s tariffs weren’t so substantial.

“In effect, we went on hold when we saw the size of the tariffs, and essentially all inflation forecasts for the United States went up materially as a consequence of the tariffs. We didn’t overreact. In fact, we didn’t react at all; we’re simply taking some time.”

If Powell was removed or the president attempted to fire him, it could have far-ranging impacts.

“In the unlikely event that Fed Chair Powell is removed or steps down before his term ends in May 2026,” U.S. government debt yields would likely surge, raising the cost for the government to borrow money, analysts at ING said Friday. Stocks would also “likely sell off” given that removal would be “an unprecedented event for the market to get its head around.”

ING analysts also wrote that the removal of the Fed chair could “trigger a new round of severe downward volatility in the dollar, and the damage would be there to stay.” A weaker dollar would make it more expensive for U.S. companies to import products from overseas and would even make it more expensive for Americans to travel abroad.

The Federal Reserve declined to comment on Vought’s letter.

DUBLIN, July 11, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Aon plc (NYSE: AON), a leading global professional services firm, plans to announce second quarter results on Friday, July 25, 2025, in a news release to be issued at 5:00 am Central Time. Aon’s President and CEO Greg Case and CFO Edmund Reese will also host a conference call at 7:30 am CT on Friday, July 25, 2025, which will be broadcast live through Aon’s Investor Relations website at ir.aon.com. A replay will be available shortly after the live webcast. The earnings release and supplemental slide presentation will also be available on Aon’s Investor Relations website.

About Aon
Aon plc (NYSE: AON) exists to shape decisions for the better — to protect and enrich the lives of people around the world. Through actionable analytic insight, globally integrated Risk Capital and Human Capital expertise, and locally relevant solutions, our colleagues provide clients in over 120 countries with the clarity and confidence to make better risk and people decisions that protect and grow their businesses.

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