Column: China’s commodity import trend driven by prices, not economy
China's imports of major commodities are often viewed through the prism of the performance of, and outlook for, the world's second-biggest economy.
Gold continues to drift lower following Tuesday’s crash through the $1,300 an ounce level to its lowest since June, before the Brexit vote lit a fire under the metal.
In early trade on Thursday, December futures trading on the Comex market in New York touched a low of $1,265.10 an ounce, the fifth down day in a row.
Gold’s leg down is being blamed on looming interest rate hikes in the US which boosted the dollar (the gold price usually moves into the opposite direction of the currency) and speculation of a scaling back of the European Central Bank’s $10 billion a month bond purchase program.
Expectations of a normalization of the interest rate environment and higher returns on government bonds is a negative for gold as the metal provides no yield and investors are only rewarded via price appreciation.
Year to date the metal is still one of the best performing asset classes (only crude oil has performed better) and is close to official bull market status with a 19.4% climb in 2016.
In a new note the World Gold Council says the dip in the price is likely to spur demand and constitutes a good buying opportunity for long-term investors and retail buyers:
Even though central banks may start to normalise monetary policies, such a prolonged period of extraordinary measures has led to a structural shift in asset allocation that will linger much longer.
The almost 3% fall on Tuesday which happened in the space of only a couple of hours of trading has unnerved gold bulls. But says the WGC, the drop was exacerbated by technical factors and the absence of Chinese bargain hunters:
Once the gold price pushed below US$1,310/oz an ounce, representing gold’s 100-day moving average, technical selling increased sharply, exacerbating the fall and triggering stop-losses and further tactical selling.
Meanwhile, Chinese investors, who have historically bought on dips, were celebrating Golden Week national holiday, leaving domestic markets closed.
Source: Bloomberg, World Gold Council
Click here for WGCs’ full analysis
2 Comments
Altaf
I think 1200 is a reasonable price to pay for gold.
disqussted999
Oh, and no help I presume from the bullion banks, backed by the Fed and other central banksters, whose main gig is selling paper/electronic money created from nothing to govts for interest payments stuck to WeThePeople(?Sheeple) (think 16th Amendment), and whose main competition is REAL money, as it has been for 5000 years, ie, gold and silver? Who else has the ability, via unlimited money creation and unfettered computer programs, and freedom from prosecution, to dump 10s of millions of oz of paper/electronic gold and silver, amounting to at times some significant percentage of all gold and silver mined in a year, in a matter of a few minutes and at illiquid times of the day with an obvious purpose of simply knocking prices down?
It’s called manipulation of markets…and it’s supposed to be illegal. Unfortunately those that are supposed to monitor and put the kibbosh to such criminal activities, eg, the CFTC, are all part of the scheme…nothing to see here…move along now, peons.