Gold Spot Price Open: $1,282
Gold Spot Price Close: $1,268
Change in Gold Spot Price: -$14
Silver Spot Price Open: $21.37
Silver Spot Price Close: $20.79
Change in Silver Spot Price: -$0.58
Gold and silver both continued along their respective declines on Tuesday due to increased technical selling pressure. When all was said and done, gold lost 14 dollars while silver lost a little over a half dollar.
With the US Dollar sitting at about a 2-month high and recent economic data out of the US being nothing short of impressive, precious metals are in a bit of a rut. Adding insult to injury is the fact that things are looking like they won’t get better for precious metals in the immediate future due to an increased belief that the Federal Reserve will taper Quantitative Easing before the year’s end. In fact, market experts and investors alike are looking ahead to December’s FOMC meeting as a possible time for a change to monetary policy.
Also helping the US Dollar is last week’s European Central Bank decision to reduce its key lending rate to .25%. Though this news was originally seen as positive for gold and silver, the euro’s almost immediate rapid decline prompted the US Dollar to make gains which in turn put a lot of downward selling pressure on gold and silver. Even though the ECB’s decision was made more than 5 days ago its impact is still being felt this week.
Precious metals are receiving little to no help from Asia either as unusually weak demand for both gold and silver remains a constant throughout a part of the world which usually purchases huge quantities of precious metals at any time of the year. Some economic data out of the US was released on Tuesday in the form of the employment trends index and the Fed activity index, though neither of these reports had any real affect on precious metals.
