The gold market basically fell apart in the morning trade today with initial weakness seemingly developing into a full blow washout. Clearly a higher Dollar was part of the reason behind the slide in gold prices, but given the magnitude of the slide one gets the sense that either the fear of broad based deflationary selling and or concerns of too much outright slowing added into the negative psychology. While the US ISM manufacturing reading wasn't as bad as expected, the fact that stock prices were down so aggressively this morning probably glossed over the slightly better than expected US scheduled data flow. In the end, aggressive weakness in a host of physical commodity markets seemed to weigh on gold, especially when one considers the magnitude of the declines in energy prices.