By Pham-Duy Nguyen Oct. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Gold fell for the fourth straight session after the U.S. agreed to spend $250 billion to rescue ailing banks. Silver climbed. Stocks in the U.S., Europe and Asia rose for a second day after Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced plans to buy stakes in financial firms to ease the lending crisis. Gold fell 1.9 percent yesterday as the Standard & Poor's 500 Index soared 12 percent. ``The equity markets have come back, so you'll see some of the capital that was flowing into gold just a week ago go to equities,'' said Frank Lesh, a trader at FuturePath Trading LLC in Chicago. Gold futures for December delivery dropped $1.30, or 0.2 percent, to $841.20 an ounce at 12:13 p.m. on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange. The price dropped $64 in the previous three sessions. Silver futures for December delivery rose 7 cents, or 0.7 percent, to $10.86 an ounce. Before today, the price declined 28 percent this year. Gold rose to a record $1,033.90 on March 17, partly because the Federal Reserve slashed U.S. borrowing costs, weakening the dollar and driving commodities to all-time highs. The Reuters/Jefferies CRB Index of 19 raw materials rose as much as 2.2 percent today. The gauge still has dropped 37 percent from the record in July. Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. on Sept. 15, which helped trigger passage of a $700 billion bailout plan by the U.S., gold has traded as low as $767.40 to as high as $936.30. `Flight to Safety' ``Gold is trading in the lower part of its range,'' Lesh said. ``There's still a certain amount of capital that's going to gold as a flight to safety. But gold does not have the favor of commodity basket buyers anymore.'' Still, gold is a storehouse of value and may fare better than other assets in times of financial turmoil, analysts said. ``Gold may come under short-term selling pressure as money managers, whose portfolios are suffering in other markets, dump positions to raise cash,'' said Stuart Flerlage, a director of business development at NuWave Investment Corp. in New York. ``We are still long-term bullish on gold. Gold will be a strong hedge for inflation and against fiat currency devaluation.'' To contact the reporter on this story: Pham-Duy Nguyen in Seattle at pnguyen@bloomberg.net.

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