Gold rose nearly 2% to over $800 in Asia, but it then fell back off for most of the rest of trade and ended near its low of $765.30 with a loss of 2.7%. Silver briefly spiked lower at the New York open to see a 23 cents loss at $9.53, but it then rallied back higher into the close and ended near its high of $10.188 with a gain of 3.2%. Euro gold fell to about €586, platinum lost $3.50 to $877, and copper fell over 11 cents to about $2.00. Gold and silver equities fell nearly 7% in the first half hour of trade before they rebounded to see less than 4% losses by midmorning, but they then fell back off to new lows with the major indices in late trade and ended with over 9% losses. The Economy: There were no major economic reports today, but the fed announced it “will provide up to $540 billion in loans to help relieve pressure on money- market mutual funds beset by redemptions.” Oil fell on more worries of waning world demand. The U.S. dollar index rose again on the belief that the rest of the world is worse off than the US. Treasuries rose as the Dow, Nasdaq, and S&P fell on worries over mostly disappointing earnings reports and outlooks. Among the big names making news in the market today were Pfizer, US Bancorp, UAL, Nissan, DuPont, 3M, CITIC Pacific, Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar, Kerkorian and Ford, National City, Fifth Third, KeyCorp, Lilly, Coach, and Carl Icahn and Lions Gate. The Commentary: “December Gold closed down 22 at 768. This was 1 up from the low and 11 off the high. December Silver finished up 0.385 at 10.075, 0.065 off the high and 0.535 up from the low. The gold market remained under pressure throughout most of the trading session on Tuesday. In fact with a another new high in the US dollar, ongoing deflation expectations and moderate weakness of the US equity market gold appeared to be just another physical commodity market facing a sagging demand outlook. While some polls had hoped that the CDS unwinding would result in fresh financial sector anxiety, the only anxiety present in the gold market on Tuesday seem to be coming from fears of too much economic slowing ahead. With a sharp slide in oil prices and general weakness in a host of other physical commodity markets, this fear of ongoing deflationary selling was certainly prominent. With silver prices clearly diverting with the weak action in the gold market many traders speculated that short gold long silver spread activity was providing spillover support to silver prices. Some traders even suggested that higher platinum prices indicated long platinum short gold spread activity. In other words, it is possible that mechanical trade activity temporarily served to support silver prices during the trade on Tuesday. However seeing the Chicago Fed national activity Index come in extremely weak has to be disconcerting to all physical commodity markets. In the end, it was impressive to see silver hold up in the face of sharp declines in energies, equities and another pulse up in the US Dollar.”- The Hightower Report, Futures Analysis and Forecasting

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