Bright day for bullions

Gold logs its highest settlement in nearly three weeks

Bullion metals rallied on Thursday, 12 June 2014 at Comex. Gold prices rallied to log their highest settlement in nearly three weeks as growing unrest in Iraq and weakness in U.S. equities drove demand. The weaker U.S. dollar index Thursday also fell into the camp of gold market bulls.

Gold for August delivery rose $12.80, or 1%, to settle at $1,274 an ounce on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange.

July silver on Thursday, rose 36 cents, or 1.9%, to end at $19.53 an ounce, the highest close for a most-active contract since mid-May.

Iraq is back in the news headlines again, as civil war has broken out in that country amid escalating violence. Crude oil prices were sharply higher on Thursday, mostly on the Iraq news. Gold also saw some safe-haven buying support on the news. The bigger worry is that the violence in Iraq could spread to other Arab countries.

And some downbeat U.S. economic data that saw a rise in weekly jobless claims and lower-than-expected retail sales were also friendly for the gold market.

There weren't any major surprises with the initial claims report for the week ending 7 June 2014. It showed claims increasing by 4,000 to 317,000. That was roughly in-line with the consensus estimate, which was pegged at 315,000. The four-week moving average for this series jumped by 4,750 to 315,250. Continuing claims for the week ending 31bMaybincreased by 11,000 to 2.614 mln, which was better than consensus estimate of 2.638 mln.

Total retail sales for May increased 0.3%. Excluding autos, they were up 0.1%. Those results were below the consensus estimates, which called for increases of 0.7% and 0.4%, respectively.

Separately, April business inventories rose 0.6%, while the consensus expected an uptick of 0.4%. This followed the prior month's unrevised increase of 0.4%.

In other overnight news, industrial production in the European Union rose 0.8% in April from March and was up 1.4% year-on-year. The increase was a bit larger than forecast.

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