Gold Spot Price Open: $1,349
Gold Spot Price Close: $1,340
Change in Gold Spot Price: -$9
Silver Spot Price Open: $21.59
Silver Spot Price Close: $20.97
Change in Silver Spot Price: -$0.62
After beginning the day marginally up, gold and silver quickly declined and ended the day posting the biggest single-session losses of this 5-day session. When all was said and done, gold lost about nine dollars while silver lost a few pennies over 60 cents. For the week, gold is a few dollars above where it began while silver is well over a half dollar below where it was on Monday.
The most highly anticipated piece of economic data this week was released today in the form of February’s non-farm payrolls report. For the first time in more than 2 months the payrolls data came back beating market expectations. The report indicated that around 175,000 new payrolls were added to the economy in February, a number that handily beat the market’s expectation of 150,000. This news promptly drove the spot values of gold and silver down and made sure they would stay there.
Not helping the fortunes of precious metals was a stronger US Dollar today. While equities traded lower thanks to today’s jobs data, investor appetite for risk is still very much on the rise as a result of calming tensions in Ukraine.
With that being said, however, the Ukrainian crisis is by no means settled and can boil over at any moment. In a little over a week, Crimean citizens will be voting on whether they want to join the Russian Federation or if they would like to remain part of Ukraine. Should the vote go how it is expected to (that Crimeans will overwhelmingly decide to join Russia), the recently calm tensions could bubble right back up. If things do spill over into any type of armed conflict, safe-haven demand will likely shoot back up to the levels it was at barely more than a week ago.
