Gold plummeted to just below $1,400 an ounce Monday morning, its lowest price since March 2011.
Slower than expected first quarter growth in China was the catalyst for today's drop (following a $60 decline last week on reports that Cyprus is planning to sell some of its gold reserves).
Gold is now trading 27% below its September 2011 high of $1,920.
Michael Haigh, global head of commodities research at Societe Generale, tells The Daily Ticker that "Gold is a different animal than the rest of the commodities complex, driven primarily by macrodrivers,” and those macro-drivers now are driving gold prices lower.
“Gold is kind of giving up,” says Haigh because it didn’t push through $2,000 an ounce as many thought it would and because the macroeconomy looks stronger. “China doesn’t look like it’s going to have a hard landing [its latest GDP growth is 7.7%]. People are fatigued with Europe and the U.S. looks like it’s doing okay and you add [to that] pressures from [pulling back] on quantitative easing.”
Haigh says the bull case for gold "doesn’t look like a great idea anymore especially with the dollar strengthening and
real interest rates expected to rise” at some point because of extensive quantitative easing. But so far, says Haigh, inflation hasn’t taken off.
In an April 2 report titled "The End of the Gold Era," Societe Generale says gold could end the year at $1,375 an ounce. In a note published eight days later, Goldman Sachs said it was forecasting gold to hit $1,450 an ounce by year-end, but said the decline could be larger. The Daily Ticker has contacted both firms to see if they will be revising those forecasts given today's big drop and will update this blog when we hear back.
Whether gold continues to fall and how far will depend in large part on inflation and expectations. Haigh says earlier market forecasts for higher gold prices were fed largely by
expectations that aggressive central bank quantitative easing (buying assets) would lead to high inflation, but that hasn't happen.
Related: Central Banks Repatriate Gold: How WIll This Affect Investors?
In the U.S. consumer prices rose 2% on an annualized basis according to the latest available data for February 2013. That’s slightly above the 1.7% rate for all of 2012 but lower than the 3% rate recorded for 2011. Japan recently announced it too would adopt quantitative easing in order to boost growth but Haigh isn't convinced that will boost global inflation.
“If you get renewed quantitative easing globally, then obviously there are inflationary pressures there, but
even with these extensive and extended periods of times of QE we really haven’t seen any inflation surface [but rather just "central bank balance sheets growing," Haigh says. And in the U.S. some Fed officials have been pushing for an earlier exit from quantitative easing.
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/gold-loses-another-6-monday-era-gold-over-123319133.html