Gold Spot Price Open: $1,314
Gold Spot Price Close: $1,312
Change in Gold Spot Price: -$2
Silver Spot Price Open: $20.05
Silver Spot Price Close: $19.86
Change in Silver Spot Price: -$0.19
After beginning the day in positive fashion, precious metals have since taken hits, ending the day trending ever so slightly downward. When all was said and done, gold lost about two dollars while silver declined by little less than 20 cents. By day’s end, platinum and palladium had receded from daily highs, but were still clinging to marginal daily gains.
US Retail Sales Provide Momentary Lift for Metals
Despite this week being touted as one that will not bring about too much economic data, today yielded a crucial US retail sales report from July. After June saw retail sales improve by little more than two tenths of a percentage point on an annualized basis, most were gearing up for similar figures for July. Unfortunately, this morning’s report showed that July retail sales were left unchanged.
Precious metals were given a boost by the weaker than expected US retail sales report, but that boost only allowed for small gains to be made for only short amount of time. By midday, the gains made by precious metals were more or less completely reverted.
Commerzbank analyst Daniel Briesemann, in an interview today, weighed in on what has been going on with precious metals, specifically gold, over the last few weeks. In an interview with CNBC, he said, “We saw a move upwards after the retail sales data, which is now correcting. The weaker dollar helped gold to move up a little bit, but it’s still in a narrow trading range. Gold is in a very lethargic summer state, moving just a few dollars up and down. We don’t see any data coming up, or any other news, which is really going to shake gold out of its trading band.”
Dollar Makes Gains Against Falling British Pound
After this morning’s disappointing retail sales data, the US Dollar was seen beginning to trend downward. Before long, however, it corrected itself and was once again on its way to daily highs. Helping the Dollar a little bit was a declining British Pound in the wake of the Bank of England’s quarterly inflation report which was released before US markets opened today.
According to BOE officials, England’s central bank plans on raising interest rates sometime early next year so long as wage growth continues to gain momentum. Unfortunately, however, the harsh reality is that the British economy is in a dire state and that wage growth is stagnating and threatening to move backwards.
Boris Schlossberg of BK Asset Management said that “as long as wage growth remains subdued, the BOE is likely to keep rates stationary, and that suggest further downside pressure on the Pound.” Just as it is with the Euro currency, a declining Pound will more than likely translate into a stronger US Dollar. While this usually proves to be the case, only time will tell if that is what happens this time around.
Wrap-Up
Looking ahead to the last few days of the week, it is clear to see that the worldwide marketplace will remain as quiet and subdued as it has been all week long. There are no major pieces of economic data due out tomorrow, but I am anticipating that we will find out just a bit more about the Russian humanitarian aid convoy that is supposedly en route to the war-torn Ukrainian city of Luhansk. Other than that, however, investors will more than likely continue analyzing the progress of both the US Dollar and US equity markets as both have been performing extremely well as of late.
