A SURPRISE rise in US unemployment in Friday's jobs data for February saw the price of gold spike to a fresh all-time high in spot-market trading, coming within $5 per Troy ounce of $2200 and breaching £1700 for UK investors while topping €2000 in Euro terms for the first time ever, as betting grew that the Federal Reserve will start cutting Dollar interest rates in June.

 

Peaking at $2195 per Troy ounce as London's physical market closed – leaving US Comex futures and options trading to set the price – the precious metal had earlier set its 5th London 3pm gold benchmark record in a row, a run of new all-time highs not seen since the Covid Crisis of summer 2020, above $2171.

 

Gold had earlier spiked to a then-new record high of $2185 in London spot trading after the US Bureau of Labor Statistics said the world's largest economy added 250,000 jobs to non-farm payrolls in February, beating analysts' consensus forecasts by more than 1/3rd.

 

But with average wage growth slowing unexpectedly, the BLS also revised down the jobs growth it had previously reported for January and December, slashing that 2-month total by almost 25%.

 

Together, that pushed up the US unemployment rate to 3.9%, its highest in more than 2 years.

 

Betting on a June rate cut from the Federal Reserve grew towards 4-in-5 positions in interest-rate futures contracts – up from 3-in-4 before today's non-farm jobs report – and the market's consensus bet for Christmas 2024 moved to predict that Fed rates will end the year below 4.44% per annum.

 

That's down by 0.17 points from Wednesday last week, when it briefly matched the US central bank's own end-2024 forecast of 4.60%.

 

 

"Respect the cold-hearted rally" in gold prices, says a trading note from strategist Nicky Shiels at Swiss bullion refining and finance group MKS Pamp.

 

"It's so clear there is a persistent stealth buying program in place give price action [because] ALL the known flows this past week have been sales," she says, pointing to gold ETFs plus further physical selling and also mining-producer hedging to lock in these new record prices for future output.

 

The US Dollar fell Friday for the 5th session running, hitting its lowest trade-weighted DXY index level in 8 weeks.

 

New York stock markets rose alongside gold, as did bond prices, edging down longer-term borrowing costs  to their lowest in a month at 4.09% per annum on 10-year US Treasury debt.

 

Ten-year TIPS yields – the so-called 'real rate' strongly correlated against the gold price across many periods in recent years – ticked down to 1.80%, its lowest since the end of January.

 

So-called cryptocurrency Bitcoin also scored another all-time high, just topping Tuesday's peak and coming within $70 of $69,000 as BTC ETF trust funds continued to attract inflows.