S&P falls 1.4 percent in safety flight on North Korea tensions

Josh Saul, chief executive officer of London-based The Pure Gold Company, which is among the bullion merchants reporting incremental trading, said: “We’ve seen a 64% increase in people purchasing physical gold for the first time in recent sessions citing the breakdown of worldwide relations”.

Brian Jacobsen, chief portfolio strategist at Wells Fargo Funds Management, said: “While the tough talk about the potential for war (between the USA and North Korea) is scary, investors have heard it many times before”.

KOREA JITTERS: North Korea and the United States traded escalating threats, heightening fears miscalculation might spark conflict. North Korea responded with threats to launch missiles into the Pacific Ocean near Guam, a US territory.

US President Donald Trump on Friday said that the US military was “locked and loaded”, while Pyongyang accused him of driving the Korean Peninsula to the brink of nuclear war. “Hopefully Kim Jong Un will find another path!”

United States equities had been on track for a 10th-straight record session Tuesday and the dollar was initially up after the JOLTS survey showed job openings hit a record in the USA last month.

The Labor Department also said unit labor costs rose by 0.6% in the second quarter following an upwardly revised 5.4% spike in the first quarter.

In other precious metals, silver rose 0.4 percent to $16.48 per ounce.

A weaker-than-expected July consumer price data also supported the recovery.

Adding to the modest losses posted in the two previous sessions, stocks moved sharply lower over the course of the trading day on Thursday.

For the week the S&P fell 1.4 percent and the Dow lost 1.1 percent – their largest weekly drops since the week ending on March 24 – and the NASDAQ was off 1.5 percent.

The major averages ended the session just off their worst levels of the day.

He said: “Equity markets, including Korea, have tended to react less and less to this posturing – the Korea Composite Stock Price index was only down 1% on Tuesday”.

The MSCI Asia Pacific Index slid 0.4 percent to 160.57 as of 3:41 p.m.in Hong Kong as more than two stocks declined for each that advanced.

The Tokyo markets will be closed on Friday for a national holiday and will reopen Monday.

Markets in Italy, France and Germany also saw declines. While the German DAX Index has inched up by 0.1%, the UK’s FTSE 100 Index and the French CAC 40 Index are down by 0.9% and 1%, respectively.

ENERGY: Benchmark U.S. crude gained 1 cent to $49.57 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

“Gold, one of the first ports of call in times of investor anxiety, is now trading 0.56% higher at US$1268/oz”, he said.

ANALYST’S TAKE: The U.S.jobs figure “was through the roof” and the NFIB survey “painted a much better picture for the U.S. economy than most believed”, said Stephen Innes of OANDA in a report. The euro fell to $1.1791 from $1.1774.