Gold Price Today: Gold Slides Nearly 3% to $4,028 as Hot US Inflation Lifts the Dollar; Silver Drops to $51
Gold had a rough Tuesday.
The slide started with a single report. US consumer prices for October, published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, rose 0.4 percent on the month. Economists had settled on 0.3. Core prices, the measure that leaves out food and energy, climbed 0.3 percent against a 0.2 percent consensus. Neither number looked dramatic on its own. Together, they were enough to knock almost 3 percent off the gold price in a few hours.
Spot gold changed hands at $4,028.39 an ounce by mid-afternoon in New York, down about 2.7 percent, and the day ended near $4,021. Silver, as it often does, swung harder: a fall of close to 4 percent took it to $51.30. There was some bargain hunting in Asia on Wednesday morning, and gold steadied between $4,036 and $4,049. The recovery, traders said, looked more like a pause than a comeback.
A missing number in the report
One thing the inflation release did not contain was a year-on-year rate. The bureau simply does not have it: price collectors were stood down during the government shutdown in October last year, so there is no October 2025 data to compare against. Markets were left trading on the monthly figures alone — and on what those figures mean for the Federal Reserve.
Hot inflation, weaker gold. Why?
It sounds backwards. Gold is supposed to thrive when prices rise. But the metal does not trade on inflation itself; it trades on what inflation forces the central bank to do. A stubborn CPI makes rate hikes more likely, and hikes do two things gold hates. They lift the return on US government bonds — the 10-year Treasury yield touched 4.99 percent on Tuesday — and they pull the dollar higher. The dollar index gained roughly 0.6 percent to about 102.3.
Gold pays no interest. A bond paying close to 5 percent does. When that gap widens, money rotates, and because gold is priced in dollars, a firm greenback also makes it dearer for buyers holding euros, rupees or yen. Standard Chartered analysts described $4,000 an ounce as the critical line to watch; Tuesday’s low never quite tested it.
December is where this story goes next
The Fed meets on December 8 and 9, and futures markets now treat a quarter-point rise as a done deal. What changed on Tuesday was the tail risk: the chance of a half-point move, negligible a week ago, is being priced at roughly one in seven. Fed Governor Christopher Waller helped set that up when he said, before the data landed, that a bigger increase deserved consideration if core inflation printed at 0.3 percent or higher. It printed at exactly 0.3.
Friday brings producer prices, the last big inflation read before the meeting. Another hot number would harden the hike story. A softer one might finally give gold some room to breathe.
Sources: US Bureau of Labor Statistics (CPI, October 2026); market data and analyst comment reported by Reuters via Kitco, FXEmpire, The Economic Times and Daily Forex, November 10–11, 2026.
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