re: Gold prices - continue to slip tomorrow?

Which is why I plan on getting out.

quote:

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How can gold prices fall past $1000 when it costs about that to mine the stuff

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Gold is different than other commodities (cement, zinc or steel, for examples) because Gold is not just used to make products (electronics, dental, industrial uses, etc.), it is held long term as an investment. The production cost is less influential on the market price of gold because there's a huge worldwide historical investment pool of gold that was produced over the past centuries (and even millennia) with this pool's total production costs averaged down.

The historical pool is "competing" to investors with today's current gold production which prevents higher production costs from influencing gold prices to any great extent.

Another way to understand this is to compare two one ounce gold bars.

One was mined and produced in (say) 1950-
Labor was much cheaper
Little to no environmental costs
Overhead was cheaper
The other bar was mined and produced in 2016 with your correctly noted higher associated production costs.

Which one ounce gold bar is worth more?
The answer is obviously they are worth exactly the same amount.

This immunity to production costs is part of what makes Gold (and Platinum, Silver, etc.) different than any other commodity. It's also a reason why it was tempting to base currencies on an exchange rate with gold or silver.