The Metals: Gold rose over $10 to above $830 in Asia before it fell back near unchanged at as low as $820.75 by about 8:30AM EST, but it then surged to as high as $842.37 by late morning in New York and ended with a gain of 2.05%. Silver rose to over $10.40 in Asia before it dropped back to $10.24 around 10AM EST, but it also soared higher in late morning trade and ended near its high of $10.72 with a gain of 4.31%. Euro gold fell to about €611 on substantial euro strength, platinum gained $14.40 to $828, and copper fell a couple of cents to about $1.39. Gold and silver equities rose over 6% by late morning before they fell back off a bit in afternoon trade as the major indices dropped again, but the miners still ended with over 4% gains. The Markets: Oil rose in early trade to over $50 on speculation over substantial production cuts by OPEC this week, but it then fell back off by the close and ended back under $45 on persistent worries over falling demand. The U.S. dollar index plummeted and treasuries rose while the Dow, Nasdaq, and S&P fell on worries over the automakers as no plan to help them has been decided on yet by the Treasury. Among the big names making news in the market today were MGM Mirage and Ruffin, Honeywell, Apollo, Goldman Sachs, and Nintendo. The Commentary: “February Gold closed up 16 at 836.5. This was 14.7 up from the low and 6.5 off the high. March Silver finished up 0.39 at 10.62, 0.06 off the high and 0.28 up from the low. The gold market started out firm, fell back into the face of the weak US economic reports, and then managed a recovery rally into mid session. However, shortly after mid session the February gold contract fell back as much as $13 an ounce off the mid morning high and that break seemed to come in sympathy to weakening in US equity prices. It also seemed like a mid session setback in energy prices prompted some long profit taking in gold prices. While the market didn't seem to be paying that much attention to physical supply side problems, the market did see fresh evidence of some miners idling production and that could have been seen as long term supportive to prices. Silver gave up some of its early gains in the wake of the US scheduled economic report flow but just ahead of mid session the March silver contract had managed a rather impressive compacted rally of roughly almost 50 cents. While silver gave up some of the gains in the early afternoon action in the wake of the slide in equity and energy prices, the bull camp generally seemed to remain in control. Apparently the fear of too much slowing was not serving to dent speculative buying interest which seemed to be coming directly from the ongoing weakness in the US Dollar.”- The Hightower Report, Futures Analysis and Forecasting

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