By Geoffrey Smith
Investing.com -- Gold prices were little changed after early trading in New York on Wednesday, as both risk and haven assets settled into quieter trading patterns amid hopes that the U.S. economy will soon put the worst of Covid-19 behind it.
By 11:30 AM ET (1530 GMT), gold futures for delivery on the Comex exchange were effectively unchanged from Friday’s close at $1,684.00 a troy ounce. Spot gold was also unchanged at $1,648.81. Both had come sharply off new eight-year highs in late trading on Tuesday. The futures contract was down nearly $60 from that high.
Markets were unmoved by the confirmation of the dominant trend of recent weeks. The World Gold Council’s quarterly update confirmed that gold-backed ETFs had enjoyed record inflows in the first quarter of 298 tons, equivalent to net asset growth of $23 billion. That was the highest quarterly amount ever in absolute dollar terms and the largest tonnage additions since 2016.
Nor was the movement down exclusively to U.S.-based investors. European funds saw the largest absolute inflows and Asia and other regions registered the largest percentage growth during the month.
With little major news out of the U.S. so far, the focus has been on Europe, where hopes for a deal on how to fund Europe’s crisis response were only temporarily dented by the breakdown of talks between finance ministers after 16 hours on Wednesday morning.
Yield spreads between German and peripheral eurozone sovereigns widened only marginally as Germany signaled it was willing to push out loans through the currency union’s bailout fund, the European Stability Mechanism, without the kind of macroeconomic adjustment conditions that it insisted on during the euro debt crisis in the last decade.
Whether that will be enough to persuade the Italian government, in particular, to tap the ESM remains open to doubt, given residual mistrust of the ESM after its performance during the last crisis.
Elsewhere in metals markets, silver futures fell 1.4% to $15.26 an ounce while platinum futures fell 1.4% to $734.65 an ounce. Copper futures also fell back, but continue to trade clearly off their recent lows at $2.26 a pound.