Gold Spot Price Open: $1,273
Gold Spot Price Close: $1,288
Change in Gold Spot Price: +$15
Silver Spot Price Open: $20.61
Silver Spot Price Close: $20.84
Change in Silver Spot Price: +$0.23
Gold and silver made some modest gains for the first time in a little over a week. When all was said and done, gold picked up about 15 dollars while silver gained just a few pennies shy of a quarter.
Today’s big news actually occurred yesterday late in the day when Janet Yellen, Ben Bernanke’s possible replacement, addressed the US Senate Banking Committee. In her statements, Ms. Yellen alluded to the fact that she thinks Quantitative Easing needs to be retained for a while longer. She thinks that retaining QE will help add to the US economy’s recent growth which will in turn lower the unemployment rate even further.
Today, Janet Yellen was questioned by US senators and during questioning she reiterated the remarks she made only a day ago. Thanks to her confident stance with regard to QE’s retention, gold and silver were finally able to make positive gains on the day. Whether or not the spot values of gold and silver will continue to rise through Friday is yet to be seen, but to be fair, metals will have to make massive comebacks tomorrow to recoup the losses they have made over the past week or so.
In other news, the EU’s third-quarter GDP was made public today and the growth the EU exhibited was less than stellar. On an annualized basis, the EU’s GDP only grew by .4%, a much lower tally than what the market had expected. This less than half a percentage point of growth is a huge drop-off from the EU’s second quarter GDP, which grew by over 1%. The fact that the EU’s GDP data came back much weaker than expected makes the members of the ECB who decided to cut the region’s key lending rate look a whole lot smarter. The weaker EU data has given some investors more reason to believe that QE in the United States may not be cut back so soon.
