Gold Lacklustre; Eyes On Yellen Testimony
Frankfurt (Nov 12) Gold futures are showing lacklustre movement today with the investors seeming to take a breather ahead of the speech from Janet Yellen, nominee to chair the Federal Reserve, later this week.
In electronic trades today, gold for December delivery is trading down 0.6 cents at $ 1280.5 per ounce on COMEX division of New York Mercantile Exchange.
December delivery silver futures hit the session low of $ 21.050 per ounce on Comex and it was recently seen trading at $21.175 down $0.107.
A trio of Fed speakers are on tap Tuesday, — namely, the Minneapolis Fed’s Narayana Kocherlakota, the Atlanta Fed’s Dennis Lockhart and the Dallas Fed’s Richard Fisher, with the most interesting remarks potentially coming from Minneapolis Fed President Narayana Kocherlakota at 1 p.m. Eastern.
More crucially, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke was due to hold a question-and-answer session later in the week, while his designated successor Janet Yellen was scheduled to testify before the Senate on Thursday as part of her confirmation process.
In currencies, the ICE dollar index, a measure of the U.S. unit against six other currencies, rose to 81.186 after slipping to 81.075 on Monday amid reportedly light trade.
The euro eased to $1.3393 from late Monday’s $1.3410, the British pound retreated to $1.5969 from $1.5991, and the Australian dollar fell to 93.31 U.S. cents from 93.55 U.S. cents.
MCX December gold futures are trading little changed at Rs 30158 per 10 grams. It jumped to as high as Rs 30499 yesterday buoyed by jump in the October imports.
Gold and silver imports jumped by 62.5% to $1.3 billion in October. In September the imports fell by over 80% year-on-year to $0.8 billion. However, it's a significant decline year-on-year, as India had registered imports at $6.8 billion in October 2012.
India is the largest importer of gold, which is mainly utilised to meet the demand of the jewellery industry. Import of the precious metal stood at 845 tonnes in 2012-13.
