The recent historic tariff announcements have raised the risk of recession, so how can investors hedge against this risk?

I'm Alison Nathan and this is Goldman Sachs Exchanges.

Today I'm joined by Don Stroven, our co-head of Global Commodities Research, who's making the case that oil and gold are particularly well positioned to protect investors against recession risk today.

Don, it's great to have you back on the program. It's great to be on, Alison, thank you so much.

So, Don, I want to start with gold.

We think of it as a safe haven asset.

We think of it as an asset you want to own in a portfolio when the economy is struggling,

when risk markets are struggling, and in fact, gold, as you're

going to tell us, has had a tremendous performance in the recent period. But it's been somewhat

surprising, I think, to a lot of investors that that hasn't been the case every day. In fact,

in some of the most volatile days in the recent week, I should say, gold sold off along with risky assets.

So first, give us some insight into those moves. How do you explain them? Yeah, so I think it's

mostly because of forced selling, basically investors suffering losses on portfolies of

risky assets such as equities and being forced to come up with liquidity to meet those

margin calls.

And one of the possibilities through which you can meet these margin calls is by selling gold.

This is not that unusual.

We have seen this before, but what happens typically once equity volatility stabilizes,

spec positioning tends to rise back up.

And in fact, if you look at price action

of the last week, silver was down 11%. Gold was down 4%. But investors are more reluctant to liquidate

gold positions because the long-term outlook remains structurally very bullish and because we think

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