Gold Spot Price Open: $1,201
Gold Spot Price Close: $1,202
Change in Gold Spot Price: +$1
Silver Spot Price Open: $16.76
Silver Spot Price Close: $16.81
Change in Silver Spot Price: +$0.05
Precious metals spent most of Friday trading even and ended the day posting minor gains. When all was said and done, gold’s spot value ticked upward by about a dollar while silver was up by a few pennies. Just like on Thursday, platinum and palladium finished the day mixed but did not move too far from where they started the day.
US Jobs Data Falls Far Short of Expectations
As has been the case all week long, investors today were anxious today to hear about how job growth fared in the US through the month of March. After Wednesday’s significantly weaker than anticipated ADP employment report, many people, myself included, had doubts with regard to whether the Labor Department’s report would show the job growth figures we were expecting them to. Officially, it was expected that somewhere in the neighborhood of 245,000 jobs were added to the economy during March. Unfortunately, and to the surprise of many, today’s employment figures showed that just over 125,000 new jobs were added to the US economy on March. Making things even worse is the fact that both January and February’s job figures were revised downward.
Now, what does all this mean for precious metals? The answer today is not very clear, but the prevailing belief is that this weak data will end up coming to the aid of spot values. As investors come to terms with the “fact” that interest rate hikes might not be happening as soon as once thought, you will likely see an increasing quantity of investors look to protect themselves with safe-haven gold and silver.
One bright side to today’s data was that on an annualized basis, hourly earnings were up by more than 2% during March. Though this does not necessarily counteract the poor jobs reading from March, it does offer a bit of respite from today’s weak data.
USD Index Suffers in Wake of Employment Report
After performing well for much of the week, the USD Index took a massive hit immediately after the release of the Labor Department’s employment report. Still in a good standing overall, the USD is under threat of taking a back seat to currencies from places where economic growth and job growth is really taking off. Despite its recently stellar performance, the greenback is starting to see consistently sub-par economic data from the US catch up with it.
As we head into the first full week of April trading, it will be interesting to see what happens to the Dollar. There is plenty more economic data to be uncovered over the course of the next 7 days, and there is a strong possibility that the Dollar’s value will be pushed around in one direction or another. In the next few months, it will be critical for investors to watch the Dollar’s performance against the Euro currency. Despite making massive gains recently, the Dollar’s progress against the Euro is threatened simply because the Eurozone has begun emitting upbeat economic data while data from the US has been lagging behind. Most experts anticipate that the fortunes of the US economy will turn around before the year’s end, but that much remains to be seen.
Wrap-Up
While today did play host to a massively important jobs report, the marketplace was generally quiet due to equity markets being closed for the Good Friday holiday. For that reason, I anticipate that we will see a much stronger reaction to today’s jobs data by the time markets open up on Monday. In addition to delayed reactions to today’s jobs report, we are going to be receiving a good bit of economic data from elsewhere around the world.
