Gold Spot Price Open: $1,372
Gold Spot Price Close: $1,398
Change in Gold Spot Price: +$26
Silver Spot Price Open: $23.17
Silver Spot Price Close: $24.10
Change in Silver Spot Price:+$0.93
Gold and silver managed to make impressive gains to close out the 5-day session, despite Friday being one of the quietest days of the week. When all was said and done, gold picked up about 26 dollars while silver made gains that were just barely shy of a whole dollar. With today’s market gains, gold has come within a few dollars of crossing the $1,400 threshold while silver has successfully eclipsed $24.
While a majority of this week saw the world marketplace fixate their attention on the growing Asian currency crisis, Friday saw the situation in India and Indonesia (and some other countries as well) calm down a bit; at least temporarily. Investors will continue to monitor Asian currencies as we move into next week as it will be interesting to see if the Rupee and Rupiah will bounce back from their losses or if they will continue their downward decline.
The marketplace, especially in the US, has been circulating with stories and speculation regarding what will happen to Quantitative Easing, the government’s multi-billion dollar monthly bond-buying initiative. For now, at least, it seems that the most popular school of thought is one which holds to the belief that QE will be wound down starting this fall and completely done away with by the middle of 2014.
Even though the FOMC’s minutes for their September meeting indicated nothing of the sort, a combination of investor intuition and comments made by members of the Fed have led people to believe that QE will only be in existence for a short while longer. Unfortunately, however, we will have to wait until early September before we hear any major announcement regarding QE and its status a year or so down the road.
