Gold holds near $5,000 as Lunar new Year holiday mutes trade

Bullion was near $5,000 an ounce, after falling 1% in the previous session.

Gold was little changed in early trade, with much of Asia closed for the Lunar New Year and after a US holiday on Monday.

Bullion was near $5,000 an ounce, after falling 1% in the previous session. The metal had rallied briefly on Friday when modest US inflation data boosted the case for the Federal Reserve to trim interest rates. Lower borrowing costs are a tailwind for non-yielding precious metals.

A wave of speculative buying pushed a multiyear rally to breaking point in late January, with gold surging to a record above $5,595 an ounce. An abrupt, two-day rout at the turn of the month pulled the metal back almost to $4,400, but it has since regained roughly half of its losses.

Many banks — including BNP Paribas SA, Deutsche Bank AG and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. — have forecast that prices will resume their upward trend, driven by persisting geopolitical tensions, questions over the Fed’s independence and a wider shift away from currencies and sovereign bonds.

“We continue to see two main supportive macro factors for gold: inflation and dollar debasement,” analysts at Jefferies including Fahad Tariq wrote in a note, raising their 2026 gold price forecast to $5,000 an ounce from $4,200. Investors and central banks concerned about these factors “have only really one option: hard assets,” they said.

Spot gold was little changed at $4,990.08 an ounce as of 7:45 a.m. in Singapore. Silver slipped 0.1% to $76.58 an ounce. Platinum edged lower, while palladium rose 0.4%. The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index, a gauge of the US currency, was flat after ending the previous session 0.1% higher