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By Adrian Ash

Amid all the brou ha ha over gold hitting $1,000 an ounce for three short days this month, another milestone in this nine year bull market went completely un noticed.

Like the media friendly $1,000 mark, this level offers a nice round number for evening news anchors to proclaim. It even comes with an extra digit and it also remains to be reached and breached decisively, too.

But this level may prove much more important than $1,000 per ounce and for plenty more people, too because it shows just how strong and solid the uptrend in Gold Prices has been to date. Historically, it points to the underlying trends of both Dollar weakness and gold strength.

Trouble is, this new level for the Gold Price comes in terms of a dead, defunct currency. So it speaks to ages past, rather than trying to shout above the short term noise of talking heads on CNBC.

And whispering in a voice of paper ashes, it says currencies come and go, but metal can only be buried for so long...

That tired old war horse of Germany's glorious inflation fighting past, the Deutschemark was finally put to sleep by the Bundesbank on New Year's Day 2002.

That was day when Germany along with the rest of the 12 nation Eurozone finally swapped its currency for the Euro. The new pan continental notes and coins were to be used in cash transactions and settlement of debt, while the word DM was scratched off shop signs and the paper itself was stuffed into a blazing furnace.

The new Euro would rise from its ashes and bring German style stability to the currency union's 300 million citizens. Or at least, that was plan.

Now Jean Claude Trichet, current president of the European Central Bank, warns that Eurozone inflation will stay significantly above his 2.0% for the rest of 2008. Track the price of gold forwards from 1999 in Deutschemarks the last entry in the Bundesbank's list of daily Frankfurt Gold Fixes and you can see that the Gold Price, a leading indicator of inflation to come, agrees.

Ask any technical analyst with a blunt 2B pencil and a shatter proof ruler. Now back at 40,000 DM per kilo, the price of gold has touched very long term resistance. Since 21st Feb., in fact, gold has recorded an Afternoon Fix in London equivalent to 40,000 DM or more on ten separate occasions.