Gold gyrates

The price of gold changes every day, sometimes by quite a lot — a $25-an-ounce move is not unusual. But it doesn’t usually vary so much within a day that Kamaaina Loan has to adjust the amount it offers on gold loans or purchases.

Today, as gold continues a strange series of gyrations, a midday adjustment began to look like a good idea. (In the end, we didn’t change, though it might have cost us a few bucks.)

As our day began, gold was selling at just under $1227 an ounce.So that’sd where we pegged our offers for this day. Within less than 2 hours, it was down to $1209. It got as low as $1207 before rallying to around $1211 just before the market closed in New York City (which happens just after 11 a.m.Hawaii time).

The folks at Kitco, who offer a daily smorgasbord of gold news and opinion, thought the move — the biggest in 3 weeks — was an unhappy reaction to the release of the minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee. Kitco thinks gold traders think higher interest rates will be bad for gold (although, amusingly, you can find every shade of opinion on their website), for reasons that are opaque to us in the pawnshop.

Still, it has been a more than usually exciting couple of weeks for people who watch gold prices. As Big Rich always says, “Gold will go up, or it will go down, or it will stay the same.”