Gold Spot Price Open: $1,226
Gold Spot Price Close: $1,221
Change in Gold Spot Price: -$5
Silver Spot Price Open: $16.37
Silver Spot Price Close: $16.29
Change in Silver Spot Price: -$0.08
Another day has passed and the story surrounding precious metals has not really changed as both gold and silver conceded value yet again on Thursday. When all was said and done, gold lost about 5 dollars while silver declined by almost ten more cents. Platinum and palladium did not move all that much, but palladium did manage to tack on around 10 dollars.
US Economic Data Pins Gold Down
This week has been relatively slow up to this point, but Thursday brought with it an influx of data that was overly positive in nature. Durable manufacturing goods orders in April moved forward by margins that far exceeded expectations. Helping this data point surge so far upward was a noticeable increase in the quantity of orders relating to transportation equipment.
The weekly jobless claims report for this week showed that last week’s first-time claims for unemployment benefits fell by a larger margin than was expected. Now, barely 2 weeks after a shockingly disappointing piece of jobless claims, the 2 subsequent reports have been overly upbeat and have done well to calm investors down. Now, we are right back to where we were a few weeks ago, reflecting on a strong US employment sector. All in all, positive economic data only works to support the idea that interest rates will be raised in June, which is something that does not do gold and silver any good whatsoever.
It may seem impossible to believe that precious metals can continue to post such losses day in and day out, but the fact of the matter is that precious metals began this year ripping and roaring, making gains at seemingly every turn. Now that rate hikes are once again very much on the table, gains are becoming harder to come by because higher interest rates are something that do not lend themselves to metals investors.
Equities, Oil Weigh on Metals
Other than today’s batch of US economic data, there really wasn’t much in the way of fresh, markets-moving data for investors to talk about. US equities and those of many other major economies around the world were moving up on the day, and this is one more thing that works against precious metals. In fact, gold ended the day on Thursday edging in on a 7-week low.
Crude oil is another asset that investors are focusing on because it has been on the rise recently. Today, the spot value of a barrel of crude oil was reported as moving up above the $50/barrel mark, which is a major psychological boost for investors. Of course, it doesn’t take much digging to discover that crude oil has been on the up and up recently seeing that prices at the pump are moving upward fairly consistently.
At this point, investors really just want to fast-forward through the rest of May and get the month of June underway. The reason for this is due to the fact that interest rate hikes are expected to come with the June FOMC meeting. While investors have thought this before, the tone of recent US economic data is such that a rate hike seems very, very likely.
Wrap-Up
All in all, Thursday was one more slow day apart from the release of mostly upbeat US economic data. The data played into the camp of people who expect interest rates to be hiked and ultimately worked against gold and silver. It will be interesting to see what the last day of the week has in store for precious metals, but at this point no one is expecting that gold nor silver will be able to pull themselves out of the hole they have dug so far this week and over the course of the past few weeks.
