Precious metals sold off violently on Friday after President Donald Trump announced Kevin Warsh as the next Federal Reserve chairman, ending a powerful rally that had stretched for weeks.

• SPDR Gold Shares stock is showing notable weakness. What’s behind GLD decline?

Silver prices plunged as much as 33% to $78 an ounce during midday trading in New York, marking a historic reversal from the explosive gains the metal had posted earlier in the month.

If the session closes near these levels, it would be silver's worst single-day decline since 1980.

Just a day earlier, silver had been on track for its best monthly performance since the U.S. Civil War in 1864, up roughly 60%. By the final trading day of January, that surge had abruptly collapsed into a still sizeable but far less extraordinary monthly gain of around 10%.

Gold Drops Below $5,000 As Wall Street Reprices Fed Independence Fears

The reversal was equally violent in gold. The yellow metal fell to $4,700 per ounce, a 12% daily decline that would also mark gold's worst session since March 1980 if sustained into the close.

The SPDR Gold Shares (NYSE:GLD) tumbled 12%, the ...