Gold Spot Price Open: $1,183
Gold Spot Price Close: $1,189
Change in Gold Spot Price: +$6
Silver Spot Price Open: $16.36
Silver Spot Price Close: $16.52
Change in Silver Spot Price: +$0.16
Precious metals didn’t really do much moving to close out the first full week of May trading. When all was said and done, gold added about 6 dollars while silver moved up by 16 cents. Platinum and palladium had a mixed day, but didn’t move too far from where they started.
Labor Department Employment Report Falls In Line With Expectations
All week long, the focus of the marketplace has been today’s US Labor Department report on non-farms payroll growth for April. In the lead-up to today’s data, the market was dealt a number of other tidbits of employment data. On Wednesday, investors the world over were shocked to see that the ADP employment report fell far, far short of expectations. Despite most people thinking that we were going to see roughly 230,000 new jobs added to the economy last month, the actual figures showed an increase of just over 140,000.
Only a day later, on Thursday, the weekly jobless claims report was making headlines, but for all the right reasons. It was reported that jobless claims from last week echoed those of two weeks ago in that they were right near a 15-year low. For investors this was a good sign because it meant that maybe Friday’s data might not be so poor.
Finally, today brought about the marquis report of the week. Shortly after markets opened, it was reported that just more than 220,000 new non-farm jobs were added to the US economy during April. Seeing as the market was expecting a rise of 220,000, these figures were encouraging for investors to see. Now, the real question becomes what all this data means for the future of interest rates in the United States. Preliminarily, I am of the belief that today’s jobs report favored the monetary policy hawks who would like to see interest rates raised sooner rather than later. Come Monday, we are sure to see delayed reactions to this jobs data from investors the world over.
Investors Eye China for Policy Changes
Being that there really wasn’t much else to talk about on Friday from an economic data standpoint, investors had no choice but to look ahead to what next week holds. Naturally, their attention was turned to China, a country that is believed to be on the verge of making more monetary policy shifts.
We were on the receiving end of some economic data from China this week, but it was more of a wash than anything else. The widespread belief is that China’s central bank will work to loosen monetary policy even more than they already have, but it is impossible to say what they are going to do to achieve this goal.
Cameron to be Re-elected
Though this didn’t have much of an immediate impact on the global marketplace, the UK’s prime minister elections took place this week. By the end of the day on Friday it was clear that current PM James Cameron was well in the lead and was poised to remain in power.
What is most surprising about all of this from England is that no one anticipated that things would take place so quickly. Expecting long negotiations about the formation of the new government, analysts are shocked to see things more or less wrapped up before this weekend. What this means for UK monetary policy, no one can really say, but it is something investors will assuredly want to pay attention to.
Wrap-Up
All in all, this was a pretty slow week of trading. The USD bounced around a bit, but did not do any major moving when all was said and done. We were on the receiving end of a good amount of jobs data too, and it will take until the end of the day Monday to really see how the global marketplace of investors felt about 224,000 non-farm payrolls being added to the economy during April. For gold and silver, the near-term outlook is not so great, but not overly awful either. Seeing as crude oil has been on the up and up, this may prove to be crucial in preventing metals spot values from suffering any major losses.
