April 2025 Tariff Week: A Case Study in How a Policy Rumor Reshaped Premiums for Ten Days

Between April 7 and April 18, 2025, the COMEX–LBMA premium for gold rose from a normal 0.15% zone to a peak above 1.8%, then collapsed back below 0.4% inside three trading sessions. Silver traced a similar arc with a wider peak.

The rise coincided with the US administration's mid-April statements suggesting that precious metals could fall inside a broader tariff regime. The fall coincided with the clarification that they would not.

What follows is a walk through what our stored premium series show, alongside what could be reconstructed from CME and CFTC data, and where we think the surviving unknowns are.

Monday and Tuesday, April 7–8: The Setup

On the Monday and Tuesday of that week, COMEX–LBMA sat within its normal band. Our stored series show gold premium closing at 0.14% on the 7th and 0.19% on the 8th; silver was slightly wider at 0.31% and 0.38%.

CME open interest was at typical seasonal levels. Nothing in the price series would have flagged what was coming.

Wednesday, April 9: First Move

By New York close on Wednesday the premium had widened to 0.62%. The move started in the London afternoon session and continued through the US morning.

This corresponded in time to the first news reports that the metals sector might be included in a broader tariff regime. Notably, the COMEX active-month price rose more sharply than the LBMA PM fix; the widening was more a New York bid than a London offer.

Our LBMA feed showed the PM fix drifting up but by a smaller amount.

Thursday and Friday, April 10–11: The Squeeze

Thursday saw the premium open at 0.71% and close at 1.14%. Friday was the peak: 1.83% at the New York close.

This is the pattern of a spot squeeze — a bid for immediately deliverable metal in the tariff-exposed jurisdiction, priced above the reference market that would supply it. In percentage terms, the widening was smaller than what COMEX–London saw during the March 2020 dislocation, but on a much shorter timeline: 2020 took roughly ten sessions to move a similar distance; 2025 took three.

What could not be seen in the premium series alone was the physical flow. CME warehouse-receipt data (which we do not carry on this site) later showed a spike in eligible-to-registered conversions on April 11, consistent with existing London-vault metal being flagged for shipment to New York.

The premium was pricing in the freight, insurance, and refining costs of moving 400-oz London bars into 100-oz COMEX-deliverable bars.

Weekend and Monday, April 14: The Peak Held

Because Friday was the peak, the weekend gave the market two calendar days to sit with the widened premium. Monday the 14th opened at 1.71%, softened during the London session to 1.42%, then reclosed at 1.78% in New York.

This pattern — Asian and London softening followed by New York re-widening — supports the reading that the bid was specifically for delivery inside the US, not a general repricing of gold.

Tuesday and Wednesday, April 15–16: Collapse

The reversal began mid-morning on Tuesday when a senior administration official was quoted stating that precious metals were not on the tariff list. The premium collapsed from 1.62% at the London PM fix to 0.71% at the New York close, a 91-basis-point move in one session.

Wednesday continued the unwind, closing at 0.28%. Two sessions had reversed most of the week's move.

MCX–LBMA premium, worth noting, behaved differently. It widened during the same period but only from about 4.1% (its structural level driven by Indian import duty and GST) to about 5.3%, and it retraced more slowly, taking until April 22 to return to trend.

This is consistent with Indian premium being a two-factor process: the structural duty component was unchanged, and the temporary widening reflected London–Mumbai freight and hedging capacity being consumed by the US flow, not a policy signal specific to India.

What the Series Can Show and What It Cannot

The stored premium data is enough to tell you when the dislocation started, how large it got, and how quickly it reversed. It is not enough to tell you who was on which side.

For that you would need CFTC Commitments of Traders data (published weekly, therefore lagged), warehouse-receipt movements, or exchange-for-physical (EFP) volumes. We looked at CFTC data after the fact and it showed managed-money net long positioning increased modestly across the week, which is consistent with either speculative demand or hedge-driven demand; the data cannot distinguish those.

The other thing the series cannot show is the counterfactual. If the policy statement clarifying that metals were not on the tariff list had come on April 18 instead of April 15, would the premium have retraced by the same magnitude?

Probably yes, because the structural drivers had not changed. But there is a plausible alternative in which prolonged uncertainty encouraged more London vault metal to be pre-positioned in New York, and the retrace after eventual clarification would have been slower because the physical flow already in motion could not reverse quickly.

We do not know, and we mark it as a real uncertainty rather than pretending the observed history was inevitable.

Practical Takeaway for Readers Using This Site

If you were reading the site during April 2025, the premium chart would have shown you what happened in near-real-time. It would not have told you why, and it would not have told you whether the widening was going to reverse.

Those judgments needed additional sources and, in practice, a tolerance for being wrong. We are showing this case study because it is one of the cleaner illustrations we have of a premium regime shifting on a news event and reverting on a clarification — a pattern that reappears, in different magnitudes, several times each year.

Analysis based on GoldSilver Tracker stored premium series and publicly available CME, CFTC, and LBMA data.