Gold strikes a balance
Posted on Jun 19, 2020 at 12:00 am
The yellow metal has fallen around 0.3% this week. But still sentiments remain positive. Growing concerns over US China Trade war, escalating Sino-India tensions along with the ongoing Covid widespread- all these together have helped gold in maintaining its price range and has further supported positive sentiments for the same.
On one hand gold witnessed buyers at $1710 -$1750 levels, while it also some jumping into the selling bandwagon. Gold seems to have attained a balance between geopolitical and COVID-19 concerns on one side, and economic recovery hopes and dollar strength on the other.
There are growing concerns that the US-China Phase One trade deal is about to get ripped-off U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday renewed his threat to cut ties with China, a day after his top diplomats held talks with Beijing amid souring relations. China has told state-owned firms to halt purchases of major US farm products, after Washington said it would eliminate special treatment for Hong Kong.
While this was on the global front, on the local front we saw widespread protests in the United States over racism. Furthermore, concerns of another wave of coronavirus cases has created panic. More than 8.38 million people have been reported to be infected by the coronavirus globally with China reporting 32 new virus cases on Friday, 25 of which were reported in the capital city Beijing. A surge in fresh infections in several U.S. states and the imposition of travel curbs in Beijing to stop a new outbreak have renewed fears of a delay in economic recovery as countries reopen after coronavirus-induced lockdowns
Adding to this were, simmering geopolitical tensions between North Korea and South Korea, and India and China also offered some support to bullion, which is often used as a safe-haven investment during times of political and financial uncertainty.
Further, in UK too gold was seen moving upwards. There was decent stimulus being pushed into the market wherein the Bank kept overnight UK interest rates at their new record low of 0.10% and also approved another £100bn ($124bn) of quantitative easing, taking its total holdings of government bonds to £745bn – equal to one-third of GDP and 42.5% of the UK state's current outstanding debt in issue.
In the US too, negative growth sentiments was supporting gold. The Federal Reserve is targeting 2% inflation and has pledged to keep rates near record lows until the goal is achieved. This will lead to a lift in gold prices. Looking at the dollar, we saw the greenback falling to its lowest since mid-March, further supporting bullion prices.
News coming in from various parts of the world, which is mostly negative on the geo-political and economic front, will definitely prove to e positive for gold and hence we can expect fresh highs for the yellow metal.
