Editorial Welcome to Miami!

Suki Cooper

By Suki Cooper
Executive Director, Precious Metals Research, Standard Chartered Bank

Hottest conference in the city, and it’s right on the beach!

The flagship Global Precious Metals Conference – for the industry, by the industry – could not be better timed or located this year as the Conference returns to the US for the first time in six years. While natural deposits of gold may be lacking, there is no shortage of finds along the Treasure Coast.

Simon Rostron, a font of knowledge, reveals more in The Fountain of Youth and the Treasure Coast.

The US is not only the largest national holder of gold. It’s the largest retail silver coin market in the world, home to the world’s largest gold- and silver-backed ETFs, a top 5 gold producer, a top 10 silver producer – and North America consumes around one-fifth of the world’s palladium.

South Florida is a hub of bullion trading, refining, assaying, storage and logistics, featuring dedicated jewellery districts and benefitting from a migration of trading and investment firms and financial institutions in recent years. With its glamourous hospitality and beautiful setting, Miami is a most fitting location this year ahead of the highly anticipated US presidential election.

The Public Affairs Committee and the LBMA Executive, partnering with our friends at the LPPM, have been hard at work curating a dynamic and thought-provoking agenda amid tectonic market shifts, and they have not failed.

While a global soft landing is the base case scenario, the military conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, ongoing US-China tensions and the November 2024 US election are key sources of geopolitical and political risk, against a backdrop of increasing global fragmentation. Gold has scaled record highs while the Platinum Group Metals are processing changing fundamentals.

Rhod Sharp (BBC Emeritus) kicks off Conference proceedings with two renowned experts – Gideon Rose (CFR) and Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles (HSBC) – providing a temperature check on the unfolding geopolitical risks and elevated global uncertainty that are recurring concerns and risks in the precious metal markets. John Reade (World Gold Council) will explore the outlook and price risks with his esteemed panel of active investors, who will share how they are managing exposure and positioning during these turbulent times as the Fed embarks on its rate-cutting cycle, while concerns around a China slowdown build and election uncertainty is elevated.

Pivoting to a cheerful note, Tim Murray (Johnson Matthey) will dive into the PGM world with David Jollie (Anglo American), Weibin Deng (World Platinum Investment Council) and Michael Randolph (Sibanye Stillwater), examining primary and secondary supply across markets that are currently undersupplied but at risk of becoming oversupplied. An impressive array of central banks will share their views of the gold market during a period of record official-sector gold buying, with Terence Keeley (Impact Evaluation Lab) leading a discussion with the Central Bank of Mongolia, the Czech National Bank and Banco de Mexico.

Day 2 highlights include a keynote address from the FT’s Robert Armstrong followed by a discussion of the challenges and opportunities in the global mining industry. As well as a deep dive on silver linings (the precious metal has been behaving more like a base metal), Rhona O’Connell (StoneX) explores how silver behaves during recessions in Is Silver Merely Gold’s Fair-Weather Friend? on page 14 in this issue. We couldn’t wrap things up without exploring the effect of Asia on the precious metals complex, with insights from the Shanghai Gold Exchange, China Gold Association, TD Securities and China Platinum Company.

In case you miss any of the riveting agenda, James Steel and I will be joined by Chris Harris (Concord Resources) to provide a succinct and informative wrap-up of the conference highlights, followed by Ruth Crowell sharing the results of the much-anticipated price poll. Our delegates were optimistic last year, but perhaps not optimistic enough!

Whether you are a producer, refiner, consumer, central banker, trader or representative of a financial institution, there are invaluable opportunities for you to reconnect with existing partnerships and build new relationships across the industry.

We wish you a very successful Conference.

Suki Cooper

By Suki Cooper
Executive Director, Precious Metals Research, Standard Chartered Bank