Gold Spot Price Open: $1,224
Gold Spot Price Close: $1,242
Change in Gold Spot Price: +$18
Silver Spot Price Open: $15.13
Silver Spot Price Close: $15.29
Change in Silver Spot Price: +$0.16
Precious metals made nice strides forward on Thursday and made back some of what has been lost over the past two or so weeks. When all was said and done, gold managed to gain close to twenty dollars while silver added more than fifteen cents.
Dollar Slides After Fed Minutes
The minutes from the Fed’s most recent meeting were released today, and these alone pushed the Dollar index further. As you might have guessed, the weaker greenback contributed mightily to the gains made by precious metals today. From the Fed minutes, the biggest takeaway is that members of the United States’ central bank still feel worried about the pace of global growth and inflation figures that are continuing to miss the mark. In addition, the minutes, though they did not say so explicitly, alluded that the Fed would retain current interest rate levels until at least June. This more or less derails the idea that rates might be raised in April or May. Though to be fair, only a very small contingent of investors were under the impression that rates might be raised anytime in this month or the next.
Officially, the Dollar fell to a 17-month low against the Yen today. The Yen benefitted even further from what was said by Bank of Japan officials in the wake of a meeting. Though the Japanese economy still continues to struggle, the BoJ today announced that they would not immediately be stepping in to pursue any further monetary easing measures.
“Everybody was short Yen for a long time,” said Ihab Salib, who is a major player at Pittsburgh’s Federated International. He went on to say that, “the move up in yen has been so aggressive and one-sided and quick that it took a lot of people by surprise.” Now it will be interested if Japan can produce the upbeat economic data that is required for the world to become convinced that QE measures were just as effective there as they were in the United States.
US Job Market Growing Despite Economy
In the last few weeks we have been given quite a few pieces of markets-moving, influential economic data from the United States. Unfortunately, most of this data has taken on the appearance of data from the rest of the world and has been mostly poor in nature.
Despite this, the number of first-time applicants for unemployment fell last week by a number that was much larger than what was expected in the lead-up to the data release. After rising by more than 10,000 the previous week, first-time claims fell by little more than 9,000. This brings the seasonally-adjusted average number of claims back down below 270,000 to roughly 267,000. Most expectations were that seasonally-adjusted claims would sit firm at 270,000, so this is some good news for the job market despite recently downbeat economic data.
Another takeaway from today’s data is the fact that weekly jobless claims have now been below the 300,000 mark for nearly 60 weeks. This is the longest such run in more than 40 years and really shows how resilient the US job market is. This is even truer when you consider some US service data released recently very much missed the mark.
Wrap-Up
Precious metals made some nice strides forward thanks to a weaker US Dollar, but the real test will be to see if these gains can be sustained through tomorrow and over the weekend. This has been a constant struggle for precious metals recently, and it would be encouraging for investors to see spot values revert their current mild downtrend.
