Weekly Round-Up: Gold's Rise Continues on Fed Speculation

It was another good week for the gold price. The yellow metal, which ended last week at $1,156.10 per ounce, continued to rise this week, and as of 1:00 p.m. EST Friday was sitting at $1,182.30. Earlier in the week it hit a high of $1.187.50. 
As anyone who’s been watching the gold price will know, that’s some pretty impressive price action. Indeed, according to The Wall Street Journal, the weekly high mentioned above is the highest gold’s been since June 19.
That June rise came after poor economic data led to speculation that the US Federal Reserve will leave interest rates “lower for longer,” and gold’s continued uptick these past few weeks has been spurred by the same line of thought.
“The gold price has been driven by expectations of the U.S. dollar and as the next Fed hike gets pushed out to probably March 2016, I suspect that is what the futures markets is pricing in now, we will see gold prices move higher. It is also a safe haven demand that is driving the price higher,” Jessica Fung, metals and mining analyst at BMO Capital Markets, told CNBC.

For its part, silver has largely followed gold for the last couple of weeks. It closed last week at $15.83 per ounce, and as of 1:00 p.m. EST Friday was trading at $16.08.
On the base metals side, three-month copper futures were lower in London on Friday, trading at $5,268 per MT, due to “persistent worries about future demand from top consumer China,” as per another Wall Street Journal article.
The red metal’s troubles began earlier this week, when weaker-than-expected Chinese import data was taken as another sign of industrial weakness. Michael Hewson, an analyst at CMC Markets, told the news outlet that investors are now awaiting the release of China’s Q3 GDP on Monday. It “is likely to provide further evidence of [the] economy’s weakness,” he said.
Finally, oil prices were also on the decline this week. West Texas Intermediate was up 0.9 percent, at US$46.78 per barrel, on Friday as of 10:02 a.m. EST, but is headed for a weekly loss of over 5 percent. The fall was driven by a government report showing that US stockpiles are up the most in six months.
A recent Bloomberg article notes that difficulties in the oil space may persist longer than originally expected.

 
Securities Disclosure: I, Charlotte McLeod, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article. 
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