Gold holds ground above $2,900 while traders await February's NFP release

LONDON (March 7) Gold’s price (XAU/USD) holds on to gains and consolidates for the third day in a row this week. The rally in Bullion stalls after US President Donald Trump shielded off all goods from Mexico and Canada that fall under the USMCA trade agreement from its freshly baked tariffs that got implemented earlier this week. Meanwhile, US equity markets trade below where they were on President Trump’s inauguration day. 

On the rates side, traders got some support from Federal Reserve (Fed) official Christopher Waller, who said on Thursday that he wouldn’t support lowering interest rates in March but sees room to cut two, or possibly three, times this year. This coincides with what markets expected, with June being the first pivotal moment for the Fed to cut interest rates this year. 

Daily digest market movers: China tensions

• Tensions rise between the world’s two largest economies, the US and China. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi defended his nation’s actions on stemming the flow of fentanyl to the US on Friday at a high-profile briefing and accused US President Donald Trump of using the issue as a pretext to pressure his government, Bloomberg reports.
• Anticipations were high for the crypto industry after President Donald Trump signed a long-awaited order creating a strategic Bitcoin reserve and an additional stockpile of other digital assets. However, Bitcoin tanked below $90,000 after it turned out that only already owned tokens would be centralized and no new Bitcoin would be bought with taxpayers’ money, Bloomberg reports. 
• “If the labor market, everything, seems to be holding, then you can just kind of keep an eye on inflation,” Fed’s Waller said on Thursday at the Wall Street Journal CFO Network Summit. “If you think it’s moving back towards the target, you can start lowering rates. I wouldn’t say at the next meeting, but could certainly see going forward.”, Waller added, Reuters reports. 
• Australia shipped a record amount of Gold to the US in January, as fears over potential tariffs saw traders rush to deliver metal into New York warehouses in order to capitalize on extreme price dislocations between key markets. Exports to the US totaled A$4.6 billion ($2.9 billion) in the month — the highest amount in records dating back to 1995, the Australian Bureau of Statistics said in its latest monthly trade report, Bloomberg reports.

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