Good morning and welcome to the ABC’s finance blog! I’ll be your guide for the next few hours.

The local share market is on track to start its day relatively flat, while the Australian dollar is slightly weaker (-0.5%) to 65.8 US cents.

It comes after modest losses on Wall Street (from record high levels), as shares of major tech companies with investments in artificial intelligence (AI) fell.

AI bubble?

The biggest drags on the US markets were Microsoft (-0.9%), Alphabet (-1.7%), Tesla (-4.5%) and Oracle (-2.4%).

Lately, there have been concerns about whether AI is in a bubble — something that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos believes is absolutely the case!

Mr Bezos said AI was in an “industrial bubble”, where many companies’ share prices are “disconnected from the fundamentals” of their business, during a Q&A session at a tech conference in Turn, Italy on Friday.

This is something Mr Bezos know a lot about, given his company survived the dot com bust, which took out a lot of his competitors.

Another record high for gold

Meanwhile, the price of gold just keeps getting higher and higher, and is now at a new record high.

The spot price is up 0.6% to $US3,985 an ounce (ie. what you’d pay to buy the physical metal right now)

However, the price of gold futures went up 0.7% to $US4,004 an ounce. (That’s when you purchase a contracts to receive the gold at a future date. So that’s a sign people are expecting the price to climb even higher).

The precious metal’s value has surged by around 50% since the year began.

Partly it’s because of the 10% drop in the US dollar as President Donald Trump’s radical polices are inflicting major disruption on the global trade system and raising concerns about the independence of the Federal Reserve.

On top of that, central banks in China and other countries have been purchasing gold rapidly, as they attempt to diversify away from the US dollar.

The latest driver of the gold price is the expectation the Fed will continue slashing interest rates in America. That’s likely to weaken the greenback and make it more attractive to own assets which don’t pay interest (like gold).