Palladium Price in the 1970s

Palladium began the decade as a minor industrial and dental metal, trading near $38 per troy ounce in 1970 and drifting to $37 in 1971 before the broad commodity boom took over. As inflation, a weakening dollar, and speculative interest swept through raw materials, palladium climbed to $42 in 1972 and then leapt to $78 in 1973. The first oil shock, triggered by the OAPEC embargo that began in October 1973, sent energy and precious metals soaring together, and palladium reached its first major peak of $133 in 1974. That spike proved fragile. The mid-decade recession and cooling speculation dragged the price down to $93 in 1975 and all the way to $51 in 1976.

The bottom of the cycle came in 1977 at about $49, the same year the New York Mercantile Exchange launched palladium futures and gave the metal a formal price-discovery venue for the first time. From that low, palladium turned higher again, recovering to $63 in 1978 and then vaulting to $120 in 1979 as a second wave of commodity inflation built. Because these early figures come from USGS and Engelhard producer quotes rather than a continuous market fix, they are less precise than the exchange and London data of later decades, but the shape of the decade is clear: a boom to $133, a bust to $49, and a renewed run to $120.

Two forces shaped the decade. The first was macroeconomic. Palladium moved in step with the twin oil shocks and the runaway inflation of the era, so the 1974 peak coincided with the first energy crisis and the 1979 surge rode the second. That late-decade jump was part of a broad precious-metals mania set off by the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the quadrupling of oil prices, and roughly 13.5% US inflation, the same environment in which gold ran from about $190 to $850 and the Hunt brothers accumulated silver. Palladium, still a small and thinly traded market, was pulled along by that speculative tide rather than leading it.

The second force was structural and longer lasting. The 1975 Clean Air Act pushed automakers toward catalytic converters, creating genuine industrial demand for platinum-group metals just as palladium was gaining a tradable market. That auto-catalyst link, still modest in the 1970s, would become the metal's defining driver in later decades, eventually making palladium far more valuable than gold. The 1979 close near $120 marked more than triple the 1970 starting point, but it was also a warning about volatility. The mania broke in early 1980, and palladium, like silver and gold, would spend much of the following decade giving back its speculative gains before industrial demand reasserted control.