The killing of Qassem Suleimani sends gold to a seven-year high

“NOBODY REALLY understands gold prices, and I don’t pretend to understand them either,” Ben Bernanke, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, told America’s Senate Banking Committee in 2013, after a turbulent few months in the market for the metal (it hit its all-time peak in 2011, at the height of the euro-zone crisis and following a downgrade of America’s credit rating). Yet it is not difficult to understand why the price of gold hit its highest level since early that year—$1,588 per ounce—on January 6th.