U.S. dollar down, gold hits all-time high

Fun fact to owe the day, one troy ounce is about 10% heavier than one regular ounce. Gold is where we're gonna start from American public media. This is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Risdall. It is Monday today. This one is the December 22. Good as always to have you along, everybody. It cost you, as of the close today in New York, a record $4,444.60 to get yourself one of the aforementioned troy ounces of gold. That is yet another record high. The safest of safe havens is up 70% for the year, 70%. And, yes, there is lots going on out there to be seeking safety from. But as marketplace's Henriette reports now to get us going, there is something else in the mix too. A lot of market analysts think that the Federal Reserve will cut rates at least twice next year. That's based on the direction the job market and inflation appear to be heading. There are two reasons lower rates could make gold more interesting to investors. The first is straightforward, says Paolo Pasquariello, a finance professor at the University of Michigan. In finance, when somebody wants to speculate on a financial asset, you want to make a bet on stock or a bond or on gold or silver, the way speculators do it is to borrow money in order to make the bets. Lower interest rates would make it cheaper to borrow money to buy a bunch of gold. The second reason is a bit more conceptual. Instead of buying gold and silver, you could keep money in the bank. And if you keep money in the bank, you'll be earning interest. Say in a certificate of deposit or money market account. But if rates go down, the interest you get from the bank often goes down too. And even though gold doesn't earn you any interest, it could become relatively more attractive. Philip Strebel is chief market strategist at Blue Line Futures. An investor will wanna get that money working somewhere else where they believe that they can get a higher yield. So gold has historically been their, like, go to commodity on that. So the expectation that more investors may flock to gold if rates fall could be part of the reason the metals price has been rising. But the level of interest rates is not the only determinant of the price of gold. Campbell Harvey is a professor of finance at Duke. Another factor, a lot of countries that have historically invested in US Treasury bonds because they're a safe bet are feeling a bit less sure about them these days. Countries that are heavily weighted in US dollar assets are looking for something else defensive, and gold is at the top of the list. Those countries are buying it up too, increasing the demand and the price. I'm Henry App for marketplace. While we're at it, precious metals, that is, silver, platinum, and palladium all jumped today. Oh, …