Gold and silver both had a rough past 5 days, and while things picked up on Friday, the week as a whole still was fairly dismal. Despite any headlines that justified a huge drop in the value of precious metals, they seemed to have jumped off a cliff over Tuesday and Wednesday. Things that we did focus on include a continually strong US economy as well as rising tensions in North Korea, just to name a few.
Europe Down, Metals Too
It seems like forever since there was a positive economic news story out of Europe, and if you are looking for one here, think again. Dismal manufacturing data coupled with the fact that Cyprus is receiving an even larger bailout than originally anticipated are just two of the reasons the world was shaking their collective heads at Europe.
The continent, especially the EU, lacks strong leadership which is an essential key in bringing them out of economic hard times. Like we have been saying for quite some time, maybe we will see Europe start to turn things around…next week.
North Korea Making Threats
Most people know and accept the fact that North Korea may not be run by the most level-headed individual, but this week helped us realize how not level headed the nation’s government is. Threat after threat have been streaming out of Pyognyang and most of them are directed at the US and South Korea. The threats mostly consist of the possible use of nuclear weapons against the US mainland and South Korea.
A lot of people are discrediting these threats, as they usually do, but it seems to be a bit more serious this go around. Any outbreak of war has implications on both gold and silver so it becomes imperative that we fixate our attention on the Korean Peninsula so long as these kind of heated threats are being thrown around.
The Week Ahead
As we move forward into next week it will be key to keep our eyes on both Korea and the US economy. The US stock markets and the USD have been thriving lately and this week has been positive yet again. As always it will be interesting to see how long both of these entities can sustain positive growth.
Weekly Shift
Silver started the week at $28.38 but quickly took heavy losses. Even though Friday saw the metal pick up over half of a dollar, silver was still down to $27.32 by the end of the day Friday. Gold, which started the first full week of April at $1,599 reacted in similar fashion to silver and somehow managed to only be down about 20 dollars when all was said and done.