Gold Spot Price Open: $1,359
Gold Spot Price Close: $1,363
Change in Gold Spot Price: +$4
Silver Spot Price Open: $20.44
Silver Spot Price Close: $20.32
Change in Silver Spot Price: -$0.12
Precious metals bounced back, to some extent, on Thursday but their move forward was not as pronounced as some might have hoped. When all was said and done, gold ended up gaining about 4 dollars while silver actually ended up losing value by day’s end. Platinum and palladium both lost on the day, but neither metal moved backwards entirely too far.
Bank of England Introduces New Policy
Stocks in the US and Europe did not do much moving on the day as most indexes were mixed by the time the day ended. This is more or less typical of this time of year seeing as August is historically one of the slowest months of the year.
A big pieces of news that was dealt earlier in the day had to do with the Bank of England announcing that they are going to be slashing the nation’s interest rates. In addition, the BoE announced that they would be adding a bond-purchasing stimulus program aimed at pumping more money into the UK economy, encouraging spending, and ultimately boosting economic growth. While some investors were expecting the Bank of England to do something with their monetary policy in the wake of BRExit, few were anticipating such a large shift in policy.
BoE officials also made it very clear that if these policies are not deemed to be strong enough to implement the desired change, the central bank has no qualms with expanding bond purchases or perhaps further lowering interest rates. With that said, the reduction to rates we saw today are some of the largest the UK has seen in quite some time.
Weekly Unemployment Hits Close to All-Time Lows
This is a big week for US employment as a number of key reports have been and are going to be released before the week is through. Yesterday brought with it an upbeat report from the payrolls processor ADP which showed that private-sector job growth outpaced expectations. While this bit of news was assuredly positive and upbeat, it is typical for investors not to weight that particular piece of data too heavily, as it does not always represent an accurate reflection of what the Department of Labor’s report is going to show.
Today, the weekly jobless claims report was dealt and it gave investors something to reflect upon while simultaneously boosting expectations for Friday’s non-farms report. All in all, the weekly jobless claims data showed that 3,000 more people applied for first-time unemployment last week than the week before. This brings the seasonally-adjusted average down to 269,000 claims which is not an outrageously high number, but also not one that makes experts and investors overly happy.
Now, as you might expect, the attention of the global marketplace turns to the non-farms payrolls report that is going to be dished out by the Department of Labor on Friday. Right now there are not the loftiest of expectations for non-farm payrolls growth, but plenty of people are still holding out hope that July was, in fact, an upbeat month for US employment.
Wrap-Up
Thursday saw the global marketplace perk up a bit after a rather lackluster first three days of the week. Metals did not do terribly on the day and might have performed a bit better were it not for crude oil pushing just a little bit higher. This now marks two consecutive days of gains for oil.
As we look forward to the final day of the week the only report that investors are really going to concern themselves with is the non-farm payrolls report from the US. Should the report be overly upbeat, expect rate hike speculation to pick back up, should it be poor and fall short of expectations, you can all but guarantee that rates will be kept steady through the duration of this year. While this is not a set in stone fact, this describes the train of thought most investors have subscribed to.
