Gold tops $1,000 mark for first time since March

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Gold jumped above $1,000 an ounce today for the first time since last March, as fearful traders and investors sought refuge amid the latest global dive in stocks.

Gold futures for delivery this month rose as high as $1,004.90 an ounce in New York, up from $976.10 on Thursday. The contract closed at $1,001.80, short of the record close of $1,004.30 set on March 18, 2008.

In electronic trading the price pulled back further from the day’s peak. Futures were near $995 an ounce as of about 12:30 p.m. PST, as stocks rebounded from their worst levels of the session.

The SPDR Gold Trust exchange-traded fund was up $1.96 to $97.73 with about 30 minutes to go in the trading session.

Silver and platinum also have rallied today.

Gold has been on a tear since mid-January, when it was trading at $808 an ounce. It isn’t exaggerating to say that some people are turning to gold because they’ve lost faith in nearly everything else: the economy, the financial system, real estate, the stock market.

Precious metals are benefiting from the panic sense that ‘everything else has been destroyed,’ said Leonard Kaplan, head of money manager Prospector Asset Management in Evanston, Ill.

Yes, that’s overstating reality. But with the Dow Jones industrial average down more than 15% this year, it’s understandable that many investors fear that things are continuing to go very wrong.

The factors driving gold ‘are the same as last year -- just more dire now,’ said Larry Young, a trader at Infinity Futures in Chicago.

What’s more, in the last two days, the dollar -- which competes with gold as a hiding place for worried money -- has begun to show signs of cracking. The DXY index, which measures the dollar against six major rival currencies, has slipped 1.7% since Wednesday.

Gold’s rally a year ago halted in part because the dollar began to surge. If the greenback is headed lower this time around, gold could be left standing alone as a haven.

Kaplan’s view is that gold is on its way to becoming ‘just another bubble,’ like technology stocks in the late 1990s and housing for much of this decade.

‘Is it going to end badly? Yes,’ he says. ‘The question is where -- is it $1,200, or $1,500, or $1,800?’

-- Tom Petruno