The price of gold is influenced by a wide range of local and global factors such as commodity prices, interest rates, inflation expectations, exchange rate changes and stock market volatility among others. Hence, forecasting the price of gold is a notoriously difficult task and the main problem...

Using real-time data, we analyze how the systematic expectation errors of professional forecasters in 19 advanced economies depend on the state of the business cycle. Our results indicate that the general result that forecasters systematically overestimate output growth (across all countries)...