spooon

The Chavez announcement is just a rerun of the Venezuelan central bank (along with many others) decision in 2008 to not roll over their gold deposits with bullion banks such as JPM and BarCap. It has grabbed headlines (perhaps justifiably so) because it has come from Chavez.

And why did that occur in such dramatic fashion in the last 48hrs?

But is any of this really 'new' information? I wouldn't even deem the Independent article to be 'news'. My point being, this latest move higher is entirely linked to a mixture of dollar weakness and technical buying. Do you think gold has a story of it's own that is strong enough to withstand a sharp reversal in the dollar later this week for example? Or perhaps the market has just decided it's done enough work below 1030 now and the actual trigger is not that important. Difficult questions.

Does gold suddenly have better fundamentals than it did 24hrs ago?

Floodgates have not exactly opened here given how long it has taken.