Gold Market To Reassess Following Jobs Report; Look To Chinese Data Gold may reassess its views on the U.S. economy next week as it digests a higher-than-expected nonfarm payrolls report. Gold prices ended the week higher, but just barely, as the market gave back most of the gains inspired by geopolitical events following the stronger U.S. Labor Department data. The yellow metal may also look for direction once Chinese economic data is released to see if growth there is slowing. Metals traders will also keep an eye on the platinum group metals, which rose smartly this week on the tensions between Ukraine and Russia and the continued labor issues in South Africa. April gold futures fell Friday, settling at $1,338.20 an ounce on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange, up 1.26% on the week. May silver fell Friday, settling at $20.928 an ounce, down 0.96% on the week. Nymex April platinum fell Friday, settling at $1,483.60, up 2.54% on the week. June palladium fell Friday, settling at $781.80, up 5.02% on the week. Comex May copper fell Friday, settling at $3.0825 a pound, down 3.3% on the week. The News Gold Survey, out of 33 participants, 21 responded this week. Ten see prices up, while six see prices down and five see prices trading sideways or neutral. Market participants include bullion dealers, investment banks, futures traders and technical-chart analysts. Gold prices slid after the U.S. Labor Department said the U.S. economy created 175,000 jobs in February and upwardly revised both January and December job-creation numbers. The unemployment rate rose to 6.7 %. February’s rise was greater than expected, considering most consensus expectations were for around 140,000 to 163,000 new jobs. “The market got caught off-guard,” said Sean Lusk, director of commercial hedging at Walsh Trading. “A lot of people thought it would be closer to 120,000, or even under 100,000, so right away this morning they were stopped out.” Lusk said there was some thinking ahead of the nonfarm payrolls release that if the jobs figure came in soft, it would give the Federal Reserve a reason to curb some of the tapering of its quantitative easing program. This is no longer the case, he said, and the Fed will likely stay on course with cutting $10 billion per meeting from its quantitative easing program.
Posted on: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 05:02:59 +0000