By Geena Paul
LONDON (Commodity Online): It seems gods of luck and tragedies are helping gold out of the way now. One after another the world is witnessing economic catastrophes and the yellow metal is making the maximum out of all these disasters.

After the US sub-prime crisis, Dubai debt disaster and Greek economic tragedy, the new imbroglio boosting gold is Spain and Portuguese debt situation.

In fact, the recent Greek debt crisis is slowly spreading to almost all European countries and causing panic among investors as they fear another economic slump in the coming days. This fear has helped gold prices to gain as more and more investors started pumping in money to gold as a safe haven investment.

The situation in Greece, Portugal and Spain has fuelled fears of a continent-wide debt meltdown. To add to that Standard & Poor’s downgraded Greek bonds to junk status and Portugese bonds two notches. This also helped gold make big gains.

Portugal’s public finances have been under the spotlight this year, with investors concerned about its creditworthiness and worried that it may be the next weak link in the eurozone after Greece.

The country’s budget deficit last year stood at 9.4% of GDP and its debt is currently 85% of GDP.

Then in Spain, there was concern that the euro crisis might spread there. Unemploymeny in Spain currently stands at 20%, the highest in the eurozone, and the country is mired in the worst recession for decades.

The economy contracted by 0.1% in the fourth quarter of 2009, marking the seventh successive quarter of negative gross domestic product.

Meanwhile, European Council president announced emergency summit amid fears that Greece’s economic problems could spread to other eurozone countries.

The urgent decision to call a meeting has also spread panic among investors and many of them are rushing to gold to protect their money from another economic disaster.

With all these negative news reports came as positive signs for gold market. The yellow metal rallied to a near five-month high on Wednesday.

Gold was the lone-standing positive metal this week and that was attributable to the fact that right now it’s a safe-haven buy.

US gold futures trading on the COMEX division of the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) rose to their highest level in almost five months at $1,175.30 an ounce for the benchmark June contract on Wednesday.

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