Gold Price Falls Despite Euro Politics and Lower Rates as US Bullion Imports Jump
Friday, 12/06/2024 16:07
GOLD PRICES fell on Friday, ignoring yet more political turmoil in Europe plus falling interest-rate forecasts and dropping for the 4th week in 5 since Donald Trump re-won the White House as bonds and stocks rose yet again despite stronger-than-expected US jobs data.
Bullion imports into the USA have surged ahead of the blanket 10% trade tariff on all goods promised by the President-Elect for his January inauguration, with logistics teams working flat out – most especially to pack and ship industrially-useful silver out of global storage hub London – according to executives speaking to BullionVault this week.
Today's non-farm payrolls report for November said the world's largest economy added 21.9% more jobs than 2024's previous monthly 2024, while average wages held onto 4.0% annual growth.
Contrary to analysts warning that
a strong non-farm payrolls report could dent the odds of the Federal Reserve continuing to cut interest rates, betting on another quarter-point cut at the Fed meeting in 2 weeks' time jumped from 2-in-3 to more than 9-in-10 of futures positions tracked by the CME derivatives exchange's FedWatch tool.
That put the futures market's typical forecast for year-end Fed rates in line with
the US central bank's own 'dot plot' forecast at 4.40%.
Longer-term borrowing costs also eased in the bond market Friday despite the strong US jobs data, taking 10-year US Treasury yields down to the lowest in nearly 4 weeks below 4.14% per annum.
Yet gold prices still extended their drop, albeit fixing in London $20 above last night's 1-week spot-market low of $2614 per Troy ounce with a 0.7% drop from last Friday.
Bucharest's BET share index also fell again – slashing the 22.0% year-to-date gains seen in mid-2024 to just 5.2% – as Romania's
constitutional court over-turned last month's presidential first round election in the EU member state on intelligence reports that ultranationalist unknown Călin Georgescu won thanks only to massive social media campaigns echoing Kremlin-run operations in Ukraine and Moldova.
Having ignored Tuesday night's sudden (and quickly over-turned) imposition of martial law in South Korea, gold prices failed to move on
the collapse of France's coalition Government Thursday morning after the Prime Minister suffered a vote of 'no confidence' in his budget plans.
Gold then fell as news broke of a senior US health insurance executive being shot dead in Manhattan in
what could be 'political violence' over his industry's costs, profits and exclusions.
The rising imports of bullion into the US ahead of Trump re-taking office are driven by suppliers and most particularly industrial users of silver – vital to technologies including photovoltaic energy.
Giant US gold-backed the GLD yesterday shrank again, down another 0.7% in size to its smallest in almost 4 weeks.
Silver's No.1 ETF the iShares SLV product in contrast – which holds almost 4/5ths of its bullion backing in London rather than New York – grew by 0.9% to its largest in 2 weeks.
Silver prices today fixed above $31.12 per Troy ounce at midday in London, rising 1.4% for the week.
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