Gold Spot Price Open: $1,295
Gold Spot Price Close: $1,292
Change in Gold Spot Price: -$3
Silver Spot Price Open: $19.46
Silver Spot Price Close: $19.49
Change in Silver Spot Price: +$0.03
Gold and silver experienced mixed results, but ended the day near even on Wednesday. When all was said and done, gold lost about 3 dollars while silver was able to add a few pennies.
The talk of the investing world for the last few days has been today’s release of the latest FOMC minutes. When the minutes were finally released in the early afternoon, they ended up putting a small amount of pressure on precious metals. The hawkish minutes saw members of the Fed discussing possible plans for raising interest rates sometime down the road. This news lifted most US equities as well as the US Dollar.
US Treasury bond yields have been on the decline recently and are beginning to concern some investors. Bond yields have long been considered one of the best ways to gauge the overall strength of an economy, and if yields continue to fall the Fed will have to pay attention and perhaps alter monetary policy in some way or another. Some people even worry that the US may be on the brink of declining back into another recession, though this is nothing more than speculation at this point.
The crisis in Ukraine is not at all resolved, but has evolved in a number of ways. Earlier this week, Russian troops began withdrawing from their positions just over the Ukrainian border in Russia’s first attempt at peacefully bringing about a solution to the crisis. While tensions have taken a momentary step backwards, Ukrainian presidential elections are expected to be held this Sunday and may spark more unrest. If we have learned anything over the course of the past two months or so, we know that you can never sleep on Ukraine as violence can flare up at any given point in time.
