By Geoffrey Smith
Investing.com --Gold returned to trading like a risk asset on Thursday, rising over 2% in line with U.S. stocks as President Donald Trump called an end to the global price war in crude oil markets – albeit without any immediate corroboration from Saudi Arabia and Russia.
By 12:35 PM ET (1635 GMT), gold futures for delivery on the Comex exchange were up 2.4% at $1,629.40 a troy ounce.
Spot gold was up 1.2% at $1,609.55 an ounce.
Silver futures also rose 4.2% to $14.57 an ounce while platinum futures rose 1.1% to $725.75.
Gold has tended to rise in recent weeks even when confidence has returned to risk assets, something that reduces the risk of forced selling of other holdings.
However, portfolio buyers have been constantly supporting prices for over a week, even without Trump’s intervention, convinced that the Covid-19 pandemic will require a prolonged period of low or negative real interest rates to support the global economy.
Bloomberg reported earlier Thursday that gold-backed ETFs have enjoyed eight-straight sessions of inflows, with just under 160,000 oz of inflows on Wednesday alone. So far this year, they’ve added a net 90.7 million ounces to their holdings.
Economic data continue to support expectations of loose monetary and fiscal policy. A further 6.6 million Americans filed initial claims for jobless benefits last week, double the previous week’s tally. That means that 6% of the U.S. workforce has filed initial claims in the last two weeks.
Analysts at Scope Ratings in Berlin argued that the looming recession will create additional risks for almost all kind of assets that are simultaneously someone else’s liability, including government bonds.
“The pandemic-linked recession will have a double impact on sovereign credit ratings,” Giacomo Barisone, head of public finance at Scope, said in a research note to clients. The “extraordinary mobilisation of monetary and fiscal policies to respond to the economic impact of the health crisis…will raise debt ratios longer-term and structurally weaken private-sector as well as government balance sheets.”
In addition, he argued, there will be cyclical pressures arising from more non-performing loans, unemployment and corporate defaults.