Gold Spot Price Open: $1,446
Gold Spot Price Close: $1,468
Change in Gold Spot Price:+$22
Silver Spot Price Open: $23.39
Silver Spot Price Close: $23.87
Change in Silver Spot Price:+$0.48
Gold and silver both, after suffering further losses overnight, rebounded Thursday morning on news coming out of Europe. At the end of the day gold was up about 22 dollars while silver gained just two pennies shy of a half dollar.
The big news on the day was a European Central Bank announcement where they said that interest rates across the region were going to be slashed. The interest rates that were slashed fell from .75% to .5%. While this announcement did not come as a surprise and was actually expected, it helped boost precious metals nonetheless. The cutting of interest rates could not have come at a better time as a news story also out of Europe highlighted that manufacturing data in Europe was disappointing for the month of April. In fact, manufacturing in Europe has been on the decline for a few months now.
Yesterday we reported that the FOMC’s meeting yielded no major surprises as far as Quantitative Easing is concerned, but the lack of announcement on QE helped push gold forward today. The fact of the matter is that if and when QE is slowed down or stopped, it will likely mean bad news for precious metals investors, so these same investors are taking it as extraordinarily good news that there was no announcement saying that QE was going to be brought to an end. To be fair, the current state of the economy in the US wouldn’t really warrant an end to QE either. Even though we have recently seen periods of great growth in the American economy, these successes are typically short-lived and almost always followed by a trough that reverts the economy back to what it was before the boom.
As of now gold is sitting about even through the first four days of the week but investors are hoping that Friday can bring a solid finish to a half-decent five days.
