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SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Gold futures fell on Tuesday, moving in step with weakness in global stock markets and softer commodity prices, as concerns about a slowdown in China flared up. Gold for April delivery  GCJ2   -1.09%   fell $20.30, or 1.2%, to end at $1,647 an ounce on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange. Traders became nervous that top commodities consumer China may be due for a slowdown after comments from the president of BHP Billiton Ltd.’s BHP   -3.38%    UK:BLT   -4.05%  iron-ore division. BHP’s Ian Ashby told reporters in Perth on Tuesday that China’s iron-ore demand is easing and that demand growth will slow to single digits. The news sent mining stocks lower in Asia and Europe and weighed on commodity prices across the board.  Read more on BHP executive's comments “Anything indicating that China is slowing is going to hit risk assets in general,” said Matt Zeman, a strategist at Kingsview Financi...

Shanghai/Beijing: China disclosed on Friday that it had secretly raised its gold reserves by three-quarters since 2003, increasing its holdings to 1,054 tonnes and confirming years of speculation it had been buying. Hu Xiaolian, head of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE), told Xinhua  news agency in an interview that the country’s reserves had risen by 454 tonnes from 600 tonnes since 2003, when China last adjusted its state gold reserves figure. Hidden riches: China has increased its pile of gold by 454 tonnes from 600 tonnes in 2003, when it last adjusted reserve figures. Haruyoshi Yamaguchi / Bloomberg The confirmation of its surreptitious stockpiling is likely to fuel market talk about Beijing’s ability to buy secretly and its ambitions for spending its nearly $2 trillion (around Rs100 trillion) pile of savings. And not just in gold: copper and other metals markets are booming thanks to China’s barely visible hand. Speculation has gathered speed over the l...

As the Year of the Dragon began, with fireworks and food aplenty, Emily Liu was selling gold instead. “It has been very busy,” sighed the promotions employee at Caibai Department Store in west Beijing, where all of its several hundred employees worked through the biggest holiday of the year to handle the long lineups of Chinese New Year customers. “Every year it’s like this. Spring Festival time is a peak time to buy gold.” But it appears the coming of the powerful Dragon -- the only mythical creature in the Chinese zodiac -- has encouraged Chinese customers to buy even more gold than usual, with sales at Caibai up 57.6 per cent over the week-long holiday. A report from the Beijing Municipal Commission of Commerce showed a 49.7 per cent increase in sales over last year’s festival period, with sales at Caibai and another leading gold retailer, Guohua, reaching 600 million yuan (just over $95-million). Amid a volatile stock market, fears of bad bank debt, and a deflating property m...

This month, the Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department reported that China imported 102,779 kilograms of gold from Hong Kong in November, an increase from October’s 86,299 kilograms. Beijing does not release gold trade figures, so for this and other reasons the Hong Kong numbers are considered the best indication of China’s gold imports. Analysts believe China bought as much as 490 tons of gold in 2011, double the estimated 245 tons in 2010. “The thing that’s caught people’s minds is the massive increase in Chinese buying,” remarked Ross Norman of Sharps Pixley, a London gold brokerage, this month. So who in China is buying all this gold? The People’s Bank of China, the central bank, has been hinting that it is purchasing. “No asset is safe now,” said the PBOC’s Zhang Jianhua at the end of last month. “The only choice to hedge risks is to hold hard currency—gold.” He also said it was smart strategy to buy on market dips. Analysts naturally jumped on his comment as proof...

On Wednesday, Hong Kong reported that their gold imports reached record heights this month as investors rushed to the precious metal before the Lunar New Year – a weeklong holiday beginning on January 23 – in order to "hedge against financial turmoil." According to Bloomberg : Demand for gold is climbing in China as investors seek to protect their wealth against slumping property prices and equity markets amid an inflation rate above 4 percent. The nation overtook India in the third quarter as the largest gold jewelry market, according to the World Gold Council. The country is also the biggest producer. Bullion rose as much as 0.9 percent to $1,647.45 an ounce today, the highest since Dec. 13. Ten years ago, China became part of the World Trade Organization and they've grown quite rapidly in the past decade. They've succeeded in doing so by exporting relatively cheap goods. At the same time, the Yuan has been “c losely pegged to the Dollar - ensuring that de...

BEIJING, Jan. 3 (Xinhua) -- Jewelry and gold products have become Beijingers' most favored items for the New Year, as evidenced by a huge sales boom in the city's jewelry stores during the three-day holiday. Thousands of consumers swarmed into Beijing's major jewelry and gold outlets, ready to fork out over the precious metals and stones, which they planned as gifts and a way to conserve their wealth in times of inflation. "I couldn't make my way through the crowd, and the clamors of those eager customers almost drove me mad," said Yang Xia, a customer outside the Caishikou Department Store, a major gold market in Beijing. Yang intended to purchase gold ingots and coins as New Year presents. According to the data released by the Caishikou Department Store, the store has sold gold and jewelries worth of 430 million yuan (68.3 million U.S. dollars) in the three-day period, a rise of 53 percent over the year-earlier level. Similar golden craze was observe...

I was lucky enough to catch Jim Rogers on the phone again for a few minutes to discuss MF Global’s affect on the commodity markets, the direction of the U.S., plus an emerging southeast Asian country which presents an “enormous opportunity” . In regards to the recent MF Global collapse and it’s impact on commodity markets Jim said, “MF Global is causing forced liquidation right now, but longer term people will forget about it. People still need to trade wheat, they need to trade oil. In the longer term it will be like many other disasters in markets, it will be a blip–an unfortunate blip.” Jim added that, ‘This event will be another push to move commodities business away from Chicago and towards Asia.” In terms of where the U.S. is going fiscally, Jim said, “The U.S. is the largest debtor nation in the history of the world, and we’re setting ourselves up for terrible, terrible, problems. No country which has gotten itself in this bad of shape has gotten out without a cr...

In an interview with WSJ's Simon Constable, famed investor Jim Rogers weighs in on what it will take to solve the U.S. debt crisis, why he's shorting U.S. tech companies, why the stimulus package was a bad idea, and the looming energy crisis.

If you think the drop in oil prices recently from around $114 in early May to around $100 a barrel today is a signal that we've seen the last of high oil prices, think again. The drop in oil prices was due to several factors. The increase in margin requirements for silver spooked investors and immediately sold oil. Also, the strengthening of the US Dollar has cause oil to get cheaper in US Dollar terms. However, we should not forget that oil is a commodity that is used up everyday. One of the biggest importer of oil is China. China's demand for oil has increased 400% in the last 20 years and it is estimated that China will use more oil than the US by 2020. What's triggering the demand for oil in China is the number of cars being bought by its citizens. The annual growth rate in demand for cars is between 30 to 40%. Only 10% of China's population own cars right now. That's a huge growth market. I found this chart showing a comparison of the demand for oil by ...