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Gold futures fell Monday, with the traditional haven failing to find support as investors dumped equities and other assets perceived as risky while jumping into other assets perceived as safe, including U.S. Treasurys and other government bonds.
Gold for June delivery
GC00,
GCM22,
fell $17.70, or 0.9%, to $1916.40 an ounce on Comex. The yellow metal fell 2.1% last week, after back-to-back weekly gains. May silver
SIK22,
was down 63.4 cents, or 2.6%, at $23.625 an ounce. Silver on Friday logged a 5.6% weekly fall, which was the biggest such decline for a most actively traded contract since the week ended Jan. 28.
Gold was “unable to benefit much from the renewed flight to safety that’s gripped the markets since Friday,” said Raffi Boyadjian, lead investment analyst at XM, in a note.
“Investors appear to be fleeing to the safety of the world’s reserve currency and U.S. Treasurys rather than the traditional safe haven, gold,” he wrote. “Treasury yields were weaker across the curve today, but they remained elevated as the Fed is expected to front load its rate hikes in the coming months.”
Stock-index futures pointed to another round of losses for U.S. equities after a steep Friday selloff that saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average
DJIA,
end nearly 1,000 points lower and post its largest one-day percentage drop since October 2020.
A rise in Treasury yields that pushed the rate on the 10-year note
TMUBMUSD10Y,
to a level last seen in December 2018 last week as investors penciled in an increasingly aggressive Federal Reserve response to inflation running at its highest in four decades. Yields, which move the opposite direction of prices, slumped Monday as investors piled into the haven as wider COVID-19 lockdowns in China put added pressure on global equities and triggered a slump across a range of commodities, including oil futures.
The flight to quality, meanwhile, lifted an already strong U.S. dollar. The ICE U.S. Dollar Index
DXY,
a measure of the currency against a basket of six major rivals, jumped 0.5% to trade at its highest since March 2020. A stronger dollar can be a weight on commodities priced in the unit, making them more expensive to users of other currencies.
