Investors have plenty to be concerned about: Russian-inspired insurrection in Ukraine, Occupy Central protests in Hong Kong, the spread of Ebola from Africa to Europe and the U.S., war in the Middle East. One thing they can leave off the list: inflation.

That’s what falling gold prices show. Turmoil like the kind currently sweeping the world often drives investors to the metal. Instead, the perceived haven today is the U.S., where a strengthening economy and low inflation are increasing demand for dollars and dollar-denominated assets. This refutes critics of the Federal Reserve’s monetary policies who say the central bank’s almost $4 trillion of bond purchases since 2008 will cause runaway inflation.

“Even in the scenario where growth accelerates in the U.S., inflation is really not that much of a threat in the current environment,” said John Bellows, a Pasadena, California-based portfolio manager for Western Asset Management Co., which oversees $471 billion. “We’re seeing a pretty notable and persistent divergence between what’s happening in the U.S. and what’s happening in the rest of the world.”

Gold futures for December delivery declined 1.3 percent to settle at $1,229.10 an ounce at 1:47 p.m. on the Comex in New York, the biggest drop for a most-active contract since Oct. 3. Earlier, the metal touched $1,226.30, the lowest since Oct. 15.

Earlier this month, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. reiterated its forecast for prices to reach $1,050 in a year, 12 percent below the Oct. 3 price, and HSBC Securities USA Inc. cut its outlook for 2015 to $1,175 from $1,310. A losing 2014 would mark the first back-to-back annual decline for gold futures since 1998.

Bearish Bets

Global assets in exchange-traded products backed by gold are close to the lowest in five years, and money managers cut their bullish futures and options holdings in eight of the past nine weeks, according to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Holdings in gold-backed exchange-traded products are at the lowest in five years. Short positions, or bearish wagers, are close to the all-time high reach of Sept. 30, more than tripling since the last week of August, CFTC data show.

“Gold has completely had it,” said Michael Haigh, the New York-based head of commodities research at Societe Generale SA, who correctly predicted that the metal would fall in 2013 for the first annual decline in 13 years. He said the price rout would extend to about $1,000. The reason the gold price has tumbled in the midst of global turmoil “really boils down to the U.S.”

The U.S. dollar is buoyant, rising 5 percent this year against a basket of 10 leading currencies. The country’s unemployment rate is at a six-year low, suggesting the world’s biggest economy will survive slowdowns in Europe and Asia. The European Central Bank plans to stimulate growth by buying asset-backed debt. Economists cut estimates for Chinese growth after disappointing data on industrial profits, factory output and credit.

Quantitative Easing

The Fed has bought $3.95 trillion of securities since 2008, a program called quantitative easing, or QE. All that cash in the financial system had many economists warning about incipient inflation.

Prices as measured by the Fed’s preferred gauge, the personal consumption expenditures price index, rose 1.5 percent in August from a year earlier. The index has remained below the Fed’s 2 percent target for more than two years, and won’t squeak past that number until 2015, according to the International Monetary Fund. Consumer prices will rise 2.1 percent next year, the IMF said in an Oct. 8 report.

That has Fed officials worried about prices remaining too low. They expressed concern that below-target inflation could persist for “quite some time,” according to minutes of the Sept. 16-17 meeting of the Fed Open Market Committee. Falling prices, or deflation, can create a vicious circle of less spending and declining wages. The consumer-price index rose 0.1 percent in September after a 0.2 percent decrease in August, the Labor Department said Oct. 22.

Consumer Spending

Wages and salaries are already at a record low 42 percent of nominal gross domestic product, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis beginning in 1929. The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans took home 19 percent of U.S. income in 2012, the highest since 1928, according to the World Top Incomes Database maintained by the Paris School of Economics.

That means less spending on consumer products, which will keep a lid on inflation, said Jack Ablin, the chief investment officer at BMO Private Bank who helps oversee about $66 billion.

“You have a lot of capital, it’s concentrated in very few hands, so it’s not going to get spent,” Ablin said. “If you’re in the top 1 percent you’re pretty much buying everything you want already, so every incremental dollar coming in is going to get saved. It’s going into investment, productivity, capital, passive investments, stocks and bonds and real estate. It’s not going into spending.”

Stagnating Wages

Corporate profits accounted for an all-time high of 11 percent of inflation-adjusted GDP in 2013, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. With wages stagnating, profit margins for companies in the S&P 500 Index rose to 9.6 percent last year, the highest since at least 1991, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Net corporate debt compared with Ebitda — earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization — is at its lowest level in 24 years. For companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, the ratio is currently 1.65, down from a high of 4.9 in 2003, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

That ratio, a marker of corporate health, has also been helped by the cash and marketable securities that companies are tucking away. Those holdings for S&P 500 companies have risen to $3.57 trillion from $2.32 trillion four years ago, the data show.

Disinflationary Impulses

“There are still disinflationary impulses in the global economy and as a result there’s not much opportunity for price increases to be passed on,” said David Joy, Boston-based chief market strategist at Ameriprise Financial Inc., which manages $810 billion. Companies have “squeezed more production out of a smaller workforce.”

Despite these disinflationary pressures, Douglas Holtz- Eakin, an economist and former director of the Congressional Budget Office who advised Republican candidate John McCain during the 2008 presidential election, said prices will rise at the end of next year or 2016.

“It’s too far in the future,” Holtz-Eakin said in an interview. “That’s the only way to reconcile” his prediction with falling gold.

The Fed’s bond-buying program, which the central bank plans to end this month, appears to have succeeded in stimulating the economy without debasing the currency because banks are holding onto reserves instead of lending, according to Paul Christopher, chief international strategist at Wells Fargo Advisors LLC in St. Louis.

Bank Reserves

“People misjudged the monetary policy, thinking the Fed was printing money, which it’s not,” said David Malpass, former deputy assistant Treasury secretary and founder of Encima Global LLC, a research firm in New York. “They’re just creating bank reserves.”

Whether the Fed’s intervention will succeed can only be determined after the bond-buying program ends, said Robert Eisenbeis, a former director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and vice chairman and chief monetary economist for Cumberland Advisors, which manages $2.2 billion, in Sarasota, Florida,

“We won’t know until the exit really starts the totality of what the Fed has or hasn’t pulled off,” Eisenbeis said in an interview. There could be a shock when bond investors bolt at the first sign of rising interest rates, he said. “It’s too early to judge.”