Breaking News! Gold Breaks $1,000 on Bear Stearns Bail-Out - Friday 14th March 2008

The spot Gold Price shot past $1,000 an ounce for the first time ever as Wall Street opened on Friday and news broke that Bear Stearns – original sponsors of the first hedge-fund casualties of the subprime crisis back in May 2007 – is now getting emergency support from the Federal Reserve.

"The situation is very much that Bear Stearns was very close to the edge and it was much worse than we all thought," says Michael Klawitter, an analyst at Dresdner Kleinwort.

"It raises severe concerns over other banks."

The news that the Federal Reserve of New York and fellow investment bank J.P.Morgan Chase are providing 28-day liquidity loans to Bear Stearns also drove the US Dollar sharply lower on the currency markets.

The Dollar sank one per cent below ¥100 to reach a new 12-year low vs. the Japanese currency. The European single currency spiked to a new all-time high above $1.5680.

For more news & analysis from Friday's Gold Market action, see our London Gold Market Report here...
Adrian Ash, 14 Mar '08

Adrian Ash runs the research desk at BullionVault, the world's No.1 private investor gold service online. Formerly head of editorial at Fleet Street Publications – London's top publisher of financial advice for private investors – he was City correspondent for The Daily Reckoning from 2003 to 2008, and is now a regular contributor to 321gold, FinancialSense, GoldSeek, Prudent Bear, SafeHaven and Whiskey & Gunpowder among many other leading investment websites. Adrian's views on the Gold Market have been sought by leading news organizations including the Financial Times, the Economist, Bloomberg and Der Stern in Germany.

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