Gold Flash Crashes to A 4-Month Low, Bitcoin Rallies Past $46,000

In less than a week, the price of the yellow metal has fallen 7.86% to a four-month low.

The price of gold started declining last week when it was just above $1,830 to as low as $1,687 on Monday, on a day when liquidity is low due to holidays in Japan and Singapore.

But since then, bullion’s price has recovered $1,743 per ounce. However, it remains under pressure as bets mount that the US Federal Reserve may soon start paring back its massive monetary stimulus.

Someone sold 24k gold futures contracts today, pushing the price down by $100 in a couple of minutes. pic.twitter.com/vCQG3pRipv

— Eric Falkenstein (@egfalken) August 9, 2021

While the dollar held near four-month highs following an upbeat US jobs report that lifted bond yields, gold and oil prices failed to keep up and went down hard.

In the wake of the better than expected US jobs report, yields on US 10-year notes are up at 1.30%, following their lowest level since February last week at 1.177%.

Much like bullion, Brent sank almost 2%, adding to its worst weekly slump since October, on the concerns that the spread of the Delta variant would temper travel demand.

With the payrolls report coming on strong on Friday, investors continue to assess whether the Fed would now take a step towards winding back its stimulus.

#Gold price reached a 4-month low on fears of FED tapering, while #BTC rebounded from 29.7k to 44.5k.
BTC outperformed gold A LOT. Now 1 BTC = 25 oz of gold. pic.twitter.com/iYcHUpsNaG

— Lennix Lai (OKEx) (@LennixOkex) August 9, 2021

In complete contrast to gold, bitcoin, the digital gold, has been recovering ever since July 21st, when BTC’s price went down to about $29,000. After surging past $45k on Sunday, BTC went further on Monday to nearly $46,120, a level that was last seen on May 17.

As of writing, BTC/USD has been trading just above $46k and may go higher, up 56% YTD and down 29.3% from its all-time high in April.

Gold's *10yr* ROI just went negative.

I almost feel bad posting the scoreboard, but here it is:

(via: https://t.co/1FIo3pnSHt ) pic.twitter.com/Tl7GSAmXtX

— Single Issue Voter (@robustus) August 8, 2021

The entire cryptocurrency market is enjoying recovery, with the market cap now past $1.9 trillion. Ether is particularly enjoying much wilder price action thanks to the London upgrade with EIP 1559. Since the upgrade on Thursday, about 17,150 ETH worth more than $53.5 million have been burned.

This helped ETH rally to about $3,185 on Sunday amidst the uncertainty over crypto rules in the US infrastructure plan.

Currently, ETH is trading near $3,125, up 328.57% YTD and still 27.79% off of its May peak.