Cash-hungry Funds Pressure Gold Down for Seventh Straight Session

The gravity of the financial crisis continues to pull gold down rather than up, as it plunged Friday for the seventh session in a row, with investors looking to the U.S. dollar for safety rather than the proven precious metal.

Today December delivery for gold fell by $16.80 to end at $787.7 an ounce, a 2.1 percent drop on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange. For the week that's an 8.3 percent fall.

What is causing the gravitational pull on gold is the huge size of deleveraging across the world, which is battering everything, including commodities. This has caught a lot of analysts off guard who have expected gold to perform as the typical safe haven it usually is.

Funds desperate for cash are being forced to sell off their gold assets, even as they were hoping to keep them.

While most still think that inflationary pressures should eventually bring the gold price back up, the extraordinary circumstances now playing themselves out make it impossible to really know which way things will go; there's too much we don't know and too many complexities involved for anyone to be able to project with certainty.

That leaves us with probabilities but no surety.