And the gold versus the US dollar pairing seems to be attracting a lot of headlines at the moment.  For example, this headline - from the online version of the Wall Street Journal is typical of the news you can read at the time of writing.

It seems as if the weakness of the dollar is being capitalized on by gold, and this does tend to happen quite a lot.  Perhaps it is the extent of the movements that have led to these headlines then, rather than the fact that it has occurred at all.

So let’s take a closer look at the past month as the US dollar sees just how much gold it can buy.  The exchange rate you would have seen on your currency converter back on 13th September this year was 32.2764.  This was how many US dollars one gram of pure gold would have cost you.

But how have things progressed since then?  Have we seen some improvements?  Well clearly according to the news headlines the improvements have been all in favor of gold itself recently.  So let’s see how we got into that position.

The exchange rate between the two actually dropped in the dollar’s favor the following day on the 14th, going down to 32.0912.  After a marginal increase the next day there was a bigger jump to come on the 16th, this time heading up to 32.7235.  But even though the 17th got better still, with a gram of gold racking up 32.8150 US dollars, things evened out again by the week’s end to 32.3875.

The following week remained rather interesting too.  Monday’s closing figure was 32.1758, and once again we saw an up and down scenario play itself out during the remainder of the week.  Tuesday settled onto a rate of 32.6561, before levelling off slightly to 32.5646 by the close of play the following day.  That marked the mid-week point, but there were still two days to come and anything could happen yet.

And indeed it did.  Thursday saw more advancement for gold, to an exchange rate of 32.6235, before dipping down and admitting defeat on Friday.  That was when the exchange rate between the two dipped below 32.000 for the first time since our starting point of 13th September.  It went down to 31.8522.

It would be five more days before we managed to see a figure back into the 32.000 region again, when the gold gram claimed 32.2697 US dollars.  But could it hang onto that level once again, or would it slip through its fingers?

Well even though the week ended on a lower level of 31.9356, it wasn’t too long before the US dollar was feeling the pinch again.  By the 5th October the exchange rate between these two was back to 32.2895, with gold firmly in charge and making the most of it.  Maybe the dollar wouldn’t regain the upper hand against the precious metal for a while yet.

That certainly does seem to be the case, because from that point on the metal was worth more and more.  The following day saw a rise to 33.1079, while that great improvement was consolidated the very next day by rising again to 33.4947.

Was the 34.000 level out of the question?  We seemed to be heading for it in a big way, and with gold in charge and the value of it rising, it would be interesting to see where the ceiling actually turned out to be.

A rise to 33.7777 was in store the day after, although that pegged back slightly to 33.7180 before the week was out.  The week beginning the 12th saw a figure of 33.8459 at the day’s end – but just one day later that had risen to 34.2204.

So our question posed just a few sentences ago has been answered.  The new question in mind is how far things could go from here.  Will gold continue to rise in price, or will the US dollar take control again?  We’ll have to wait and see how it pans out from here on in.

But one thing is certain.  We should keep an eye out for more telling news reports over the next few weeks.