Gold News

Gold Price "Wiped Clean for Bernanke" But Analysts Raise Forecasts "With or Without QE3"

The Gold Price rose in Asian and London trade Friday morning, regaining half of this week's 11% drop from new record highs, before slipping back to $1768 per ounce.

Global stock markets fell, as did energy and most commodity prices, as the Dollar rose ahead of Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke's much-anticipated speech at the annual Jackson Hole central-banking conference in Wyoming.

Bernanke used this speech last year to signal the start of  QE2, buying $600 billion of US Treasury bonds in a bid to reflate risk assets and the economy.

Treasuries rose early Friday, pushing the yield on 10-year debt down to 2.19%.

"If the Fed moves to launch a further round of quantitative easing, gold will see little resistance in its summit of the highly psychologically significant threshold of $2000," reckons the latest Metals Monthly from the VM Group in London.

Reviewing recent US data, "There have been few, if any other, times when the economic backdrop was more favourable for gold," says the report, produced for ABN Amro bank.

"With the impact of recent margin increases now absorbed," says one London gold and silver dealer in a note, "there is a sense that the slate has been wiped clean in readiness for Chairman Bernanke's speech this afternoon."

"Weak speculative longs have now been washed out," agrees Ole Hansen, senior manager at Saxo Bank, "and the [gold] market is settling down for Bernanke.

"QE3 or no QE3, it does not alter the near-term dire prospects for economic activity and worries about the health of the banking sector and government debt."

Gold Prices "are likely to regain some strength over the coming weeks while the macroeconomic environment remains supportive," says Swiss refinery MKS's finance division.

Early Friday in Asia – source of 65% of world gold demand each year – Hanoi Gold Prices leapt ahead of international prices yet again, widening the premium in Vietnam's tightly-regulated gold market to $59 per ounce.

Tokyo Gold Futures also rose, regaining 1.6% even as the Yen rose back towards last week's three-decade highs to the Dollar.

A chart in the VM Group's new Metals Monthly report shows trading on China's Shanghai Gold Exchange leaping 7-fold between July and August to nearly 100,000 lots per day.

"I've said for a long time that gold would reach $2,000 by the end of this year and I don't see any reason why it should go down," said Gold Mining chairman Peter Hambro of Petropavlovsk to Reuters on Thursday.

"It could be $2,500 by the end of next year."

French bank BNP Paribas and Australasia's  ANZ today both raised their Gold Price forecasts for 2012 to $2080 and $2200 respectively.

Swiss bank UBS this week hiked its 3-month forecast to $2100 per ounce.

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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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