Safe-haven gold found support from European investors who saw looming war clouds over Iraq and tension in North Korea as good enough reasons to keep their grip on the precious metal on Friday.
Spot gold ended European trading at US$371.50 an ounce, up from US$369.75 last quoted in New York. Prices surged to US$388.50 earlier in the week, gold's highest since September 1996, to cap a 10 percent gain in the price of the metal this year.
Analysts said bullion had softened earlier this afternoon after US jobs data triggered an opening rally on Wall Street.
Stocks later fell as worries over war and corporate profits took the shine off the report, which showed that the US economy had created new jobs at its fastest rate in more than two years last month.
Gold's gains came ahead of a crucial visit by chief UN weapons inspectors Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei to Baghdad this weekend. Both are due to address the Security Council on Feb. 14.
Meanwhile, the US said it was ready for any contingency after North Korea issued threats of pre-emptive attacks and suggested it was poised to restart an atomic reactor central to its suspected drive for nuclear arms.
Taiwan’s rapidly aging population is fueling a sharp increase in homes occupied solely by elderly people, a trend that is reshaping the nation’s housing market and social fabric, real-estate brokers said yesterday. About 850,000 residences were occupied by elderly people in the first quarter, including 655,000 that housed only one resident, the Ministry of the Interior said. The figures have nearly doubled from a decade earlier, Great Home Realty Co (大家房屋) said, as people aged 65 and older now make up 20.8 percent of the population. “The so-called silver tsunami represents more than just a demographic shift — it could fundamentally redefine the
The US government on Wednesday sanctioned more than two dozen companies in China, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, including offshoots of a US chip firm, accusing the businesses of providing illicit support to Iran’s military or proxies. The US Department of Commerce included two subsidiaries of US-based chip distributor Arrow Electronics Inc (艾睿電子) on its so-called entity list published on the federal register for facilitating purchases by Iran’s proxies of US tech. Arrow spokesman John Hourigan said that the subsidiaries have been operating in full compliance with US export control regulations and his company is discussing with the US Bureau of
Businesses across the global semiconductor supply chain are bracing themselves for disruptions from an escalating trade war, after China imposed curbs on rare earth mineral exports and the US responded with additional tariffs and restrictions on software sales to the Asian nation. China’s restrictions, the most targeted move yet to limit supplies of rare earth materials, represent the first major attempt by Beijing to exercise long-arm jurisdiction over foreign companies to target the semiconductor industry, threatening to stall the chips powering the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. They prompted US President Donald Trump on Friday to announce that he would impose an additional
China Airlines Ltd (CAL, 中華航空) said it expects peak season effects in the fourth quarter to continue to boost demand for passenger flights and cargo services, after reporting its second-highest-ever September sales on Monday. The carrier said it posted NT$15.88 billion (US$517 million) in consolidated sales last month, trailing only September last year’s NT$16.01 billion. Last month, CAL generated NT$8.77 billion from its passenger flights and NT$5.37 billion from cargo services, it said. In the first nine months of this year, the carrier posted NT$154.93 billion in cumulative sales, up 2.62 percent from a year earlier, marking the second-highest level for the January-September
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