Gold prices rise slightly

Gold prices on December 23 morning rose, returning to above $1,800 per troy ounce, reported from the auction data.

The February gold futures price on the New York Comex rose $6.3, or 0.35%, to $1,801.6 a troy ounce. March silver futures rose 0.77% to $23.805 an ounce.

A day earlier, the price of gold fell 1.7% after the US Department of Commerce raised its estimate of final GDP growth last quarter to 3.2% yoy (if GDP grew at the same rate for four consecutive quarters). The number of initial applications for unemployment benefits in the country for the week to December 17 amounted to 216,000, which was lower than the forecast of 222,000.

Such macro statistics strengthened the expectations of tightening the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve System (FRS). According to CME Group, in February, the markets expect another increase in the discount rate, 69% of experts expect an increase by 0.25 percentage points, to 4.5-4.75% per annum, the rest predict an increase of 0.5 percentage points.

Tight monetary policy is positive for the exchange rate of the relevant national currency, in this case, the dollar, and the cost of debt in this currency, which in turn is negative for the price of gold as a safe-haven financial asset.

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