Gold rises after disappointing US jobs data

Gold prices surged on Friday to a near six-week high in response to disappointing U.S. non-farm payrolls data that lowered expectations for more aggressive U.S. interest rate increases.

Data showed that U.S. job growth slowed in May and employment gains in the prior two months were not as strong as previously reported, suggesting the labor market was losing momentum.

A slow recovery in the world’s biggest economy dents the likelihood for higher interest rates which benefits non-interest yielding and safe-haven gold.

Spot gold had gained 0.95 percent to $1,277.32 per ounce, headed for its fourth week of gains.

U.S. gold futures for August delivery rose 0.76 percent to $1,279.80 an ounce.

“This is not the kind of report people had hoped for, and that has put pressure on the dollar and yields, and gold is always happy to profit from that,” Georgette Boele, commodity strategist at ABN AMRO, said.

She said the data would cause investors to temper their expectations of rate increases this year and next year, putting pressure on the dollar and U.S. bond yields and helping gold.

Expectations for stronger jobs data and upbeat data from U.S. factory activity had pushed gold to a one week low earlier on Friday.

“There is good room to fallback to $1,200 within the next three months,” said Dominic Schnider at UBS Wealth Management in Hong Kong.

“The world economy is still in good shape, people are risk-on, inflation is leveling off, there is no real big inflation threat anymore, policy is normalizing still.”

In other markets, global stocks hit a record high while the dollar strengthened, making gold more expensive for holders of other currencies.

Among other precious metals, palladium was last seen up 2.04 percent at $840.30.

Silver was up 1.34 percent at $17.49 and platinum rose 2.77 percent to $950.75.

Source: CNBC