Gold prices crawl up on steady dollar

BENGALURU (Reuters) - Gold prices edged up on a steady U.S. dollar early Tuesday, but expectations for further interest rate hikes in the United States supported the greenback and limited interest in the metal.

FUNDAMENTALS

Spot gold was up 0.2 percent at $1,208.06 an ounce at 0051 GMT.

U.S. gold futures were little changed at $1217.10 an ounce.

Asian stocks were largely steady on Tuesday, with worries over the U.S.-China trade conflict offsetting support from earnings-led gains on Wall Street.

On Tuesday the pound held near an 11-month low against the dollar reached overnight on worries of a "hard" Brexit for Britain, while simmering U.S.-China trade tensions helped support the greenback.

The dollar index , which measures the greenback against a basket of six major currencies, was unchanged at 95.348.

Chinese state media on Monday criticised U.S. President Donald Trump's trade policies in an unusually personal attack, and sought to reassure investors anxious about China's economy as growth concerns battered its financial markets.

China's central bank has reimposed reserve requirements on some FX options from Monday, two people with direct knowledge of the development said.

China's exports are expected to have maintained solid growth in July despite new tariffs on billions of dollars of shipments to the United States, though the outlook has darkened as both sides raised the stakes in a trade conflict that has rattled financial markets.

The Trump administration will aggressively enforce economic sanctions that it is re-imposing on Iran this week and expects the measures to have a significant impact on the Iranian economy, senior U.S. administration officials said on Monday.

Trump's top security adviser urged Iran on Monday to take up an offer of talks with the United States or suffer more pain from economic sanctions, but Iran's president said Washington needed first to prove it can be trusted.

The European Central Bank continued to skew its government bond purchases towards the longer end of the yield curve last month, broadly maintaining the average remaining maturity of its massive debt pile, data showed on Monday.

SPDR Gold Trust , the world's largest gold-backed exchange-traded fund, said its holdings fell 0.78 percent to 788.71 tonnes on Monday from 794.90 tonnes on Friday.

(Reporting by Apeksha Nair in Bengaluru; Editing by Eric Meijer)