Gold News

Gold Nears 1% Weekly Gain as Silver, Stocks & Crude Oil Fall; Quantitative Easing Now "Possible...Likely" Bank Analysts Say

Gold Prices fell $10 an ounce from yesterday's new 7-week high at the start of New York trading on Friday, nearing a 1% gain week-on-week as world stock markets extended their drop.

Government debt yields fell further, with two-year US bond yields hitting a new all-time low, as the Japanese Yen flirted again with a 15-year high to the Dollar.

Tokyo's Nikkei share index closed the week 0.8% down, and crude oil struggled below $75 per barrel.

Silver Prices gave back the last of this week's gains, trading down to $18.12 per ounce.

"After years of being long, [we now] see gold as vulnerable to central bank inactivity in the face of rising deflation risk," Goldman Sachs' Market Pulse team advised a select group of institutional clients this week.

Last week, Goldman Sachs' commodities analysts publicly raised their 2010 price-target to $1300 an ounce.

The investment bank's Market Pulse advice – not intended for the general public, but posted on the ZeroHedge site – jars however with its own stated view that the US Fed "is likely to resume quantitative easing" before the end of 2010.

More quantitative easing "is possible," says Standard Bank's chief forex strategist Steve Barrow today, "and is not a source of future strength" for developed-world currencies."

"We've long held the view that liquidity (not necessarily inflation) drives commodity prices higher," writes Barrow's colleague Walter de Wet, "and gold benefits the most from this effect."

Peaking after the first wave of quantitative easing in July 2009, the US money supply "is again trending higher," says Standard Bank's senior commodity analyst.

"We view this as a positive sign, especially for gold."

After Thursday's weak US jobs and business figures sent New York stocks sharply lower in thin trade, economic data releases were confined today to Canada, where the Consumer Price Index showed its second month-on-month fall in succession for July.

The Canadian Dollar fell on the news, helping the CAD Gold Price hit its best level since 1 July at $1292 per ounce.

The British Pound meantime dropped out of this week's tight trading range, pushing the Gold Price in Sterling up to a five-week high of £796 an ounce.

The Euro also fell hard, dropping to a 7-week low against the Japanese Yen and slipping below $1.27 in Dollars.

Eurozone investors wanting to buy gold today saw the price rise to its highest level since 2 July above €31,180 per kilo.

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Adrian Ash

Adrian Ash, BullionVault Gold News

Adrian Ash is director of research at BullionVault, the world-leading physical gold, silver and platinum market for private investors online. Formerly head of editorial at London's top publisher of private-investment advice, he was City correspondent for The Daily Reckoning from 2003 to 2008, and he has now been researching and writing daily analysis of precious metals and the wider financial markets for over 20 years. A frequent guest on BBC radio and television, Adrian is regularly quoted by the Financial Times, MarketWatch and many other respected news outlets, and his views from inside the bullion market have been sought by the Economist magazine, CNBC, Bloomberg, Germany's Handelsblatt and FAZ, plus Italy's Il Sole 24 Ore.

See the full archive of Adrian Ash articles on GoldNews.

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