Weekly Round-Up: Gold Price Bounces Back After US Jobs Data

The spot gold price took a hit on Friday immediately following the release of US jobs data, sinking to $1,082.76 per ounce. According to Reuters, that’s a session low for the metal. 
Luckily for gold bugs, a price recovery soon followed — as of 1:00 p.m. EST, spot gold was sitting at $1,094.55. That’s only about $2 off from where it was at the same time last week.
Explaining that price action, Carlo Alberto de Casa, chief analyst at ActivTrades, told the news outlet, “[a]lthough the market is reading the U.S. data as supportive of a Fed rate hike in September and is boosting the dollar, it is still finding value in gold against other assets like equities.”
For its part, silver was sitting at $14.87 per ounce as of 1:00 p.m. EST on Friday. As with gold, that’s not far off from the level it was at a week ago. That said, the metal is down 7.1 percent so far this year (similar to gold, which has dropped 7.5 percent in 2015).
On the base metals side, copper market watchers were hit with an unpleasant surprise on Thursday. Bloomberg reported that LME copper for three-month delivery fell as much as 1.2 percent that day, to $5,186.50 per metric ton, following “an unexpected drop in German industrial production.” That’s the metal’s lowest level since July 2009.

Copper fared much the same on Friday, and reports are now showing that German manufacturers may have been hit by the Greek debt crisis plus the slowdown in China. Germany is the world’s third-biggest copper consumer.
Finally, oil prices also took a fall after the release of US jobs data. Reuters states in another article that Brent crude was down 1.5 percent, at $48.82 per barrel, on Friday morning, while US crude was down 1.1 percent, at $44.16. Those are multi-month lows for both benchmarks.
 
Securities Disclosure: I, Charlotte McLeod, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article. 
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