Gold Spot Price Open: $1,294
Gold Spot Price Close: $1,286
Change in Gold Spot Price: -$8
Silver Spot Price Open: $19.26
Silver Spot Price Close: $19.11
Change in Silver Spot Price: -$0.15
Gold and silver continued to feel pressure on Thursday as the Fed’s more upbeat outlook on the US economy is prompting more technically related selling. When all was said and done today, gold lost about 8 dollars while silver declined by roughly fifteen cents.
The FOMC, as a result of their meeting this week, decided to reduce Quantitative Easing by another $10 billion. What’s more, the Fed reiterated its positive outlook on the US economy, something that has only worked to intensify the selling pressure being felt by precious metals investors. Hardest hit this week has been spot silver which is slowly but surely heading below the $19/ounce mark. Tomorrow, the marketplace will be paying close attention to the US Labor Department’s latest jobs report for April. As it stands, the market is expecting that non-farm payrolls grew by more than 200,000 in April.
China’s official manufacturing PMI reading was published today and came back only marginally better than March’s reading. The marginal PMI improvement was widely expected and ended up having little to no impact on the precious metals market. Despite Chinese manufacturing data being sub-par at best throughout the first quarter of 2014, official reports are claiming that the Chinese economy will overtake the US economy by the end of the year.
As we approach the weekend, the investing world will have a lot of economic data from this week to reflect upon. In addition to that, investors will remain focused on any and all developments from the crisis in Ukraine. There have been few noteworthy occurrences in Ukraine this week, but the crisis is still very far from being resolved and many fear that things will deteriorate further before they get any better.
