By From Adrian Ash
As Obama’s $150bn Labor Day Promise Called “Austere” by Krugman
THE PRICE OF GOLD rose back above $1250 an ounce for Dollar investors on Monday in what dealers called “quiet” Asian and early London trade, while European stock markets also ticked higher together with government bonds.
Silver prices came within one cent of $20 per ounce, extending last week’s 30-month highs.
“Gold is sitting in a very tight range,” says Andrey Kryuchenkov at VTB Capital in London, speaking to Reuters.
“The downside will be limited because of seasonality, with Asian buyers really looking to buy on any dips.”
“My order book is filling-up, and I expect more to come as the Rupee has appreciated,” a state-bank gold dealer in Mumbai told the Economic Times this morning.
“I have plenty of orders below $1240,” said another.
Hong Kong dealers today reported “physical gold buying” by Chinese traders, but volume was light – as it was in Asian stock markets, which rose 0.8% on the MSCI index to a four-week high – in anticipation of today’s Labor Day holiday in the US and Canada.
This week brings little key economic data before China’s trade balance statistics on Friday.
Monetary policy meetings will meantime be held by the central banks of Japan, Australia and the UK.
“This Labor Day, we should recommit ourselves to…heal[ing] our economy. [But] we need more than a healthy stock market,” said US president Barack Obama on Sunday.
“We need bustling main streets and a growing, thriving middle class. First, that means doing everything we can to accelerate job creation,” he said, with a speech scheduled in Milwaukee today set to announce a new $50bn infrastructure program and also extend $100 billion of tax cuts to research & development over the next 10 years.
“President Obama’s economists promised not to repeat the mistakes of 1937, when F.D.R. pulled back fiscal stimulus too soon,” writes Princeton economist Paul Krugman in the New York Times.
“But by making his program too small and too short-lived, Mr. Obama did just that.
“When the economy is deeply depressed, the usual rules don’t apply. Austerity is self-defeating.”
Analysis from the FT today shows Eurozone governments plan to raise over $100 billion in new debt issues this month – twice the sum they raised in August.
“To guarantee the solvency of the Eurozone’s periphery would require not a few quarters of solid growth, but an entire decade,” notes the paper’s Wolfgang Münchau.
Last Friday, he adds, yield spreads over comparable German Bunds – the single currency’s benchmark debt, and currently offering “ridiculously low” returns – had risen back to “3.4% for Ireland, 9.4% for Greece, 3.4 % for Portugal, and 1.7% for Spain.”
Over on the forex market on Monday, the British Pound fell hard against the Dollar and Euro, driving the gold price in Sterling back towards last week’s two-month highs of £815 an ounce.
Euro gold prices were little changed at €31,300 per kilo.
Crude oil slipped towards $74 per barrel, but overall the major commodity indices rose.
Adrian Ash
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Formerly City correspondent for The Daily Reckoning in London and head of editorial at the UK’s leading financial advisory for private investors, Adrian Ash is the editor of Gold News and head of research at BullionVault – winner of the Queen’s Award for Enterprise Innovation, 2009 and now backed by the mining-sector’s World Gold Council research body – where you can buy gold today vaulted in Zurich on $3 spreads and 0.8% dealing fees.
(c) BullionVault 2010
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