Gold Spot Price Open: $1,175

Gold Spot Price Close: $1,175

Change in Gold Spot Price: NO CHANGE

Silver Spot Price Open: $15.95

Silver Spot Price Close: $15.93

Change in Silver Spot Price: -$0.02

Precious metals did not take part in too much price action today on what proved to be one of the slower days in recent history. When all was said and done, gold finished the day in toughly the same position it began while silver lost a few more pennies. Platinum and palladium finished the day mixed, with platinum up by nearly ten dollars and palladium down by almost twenty.

Weekly Jobless Claims Rise, but Only Slightly

First-time claims for unemployment benefits rose by 3,000 this week and hit the 271,000 mark. Compared to last week’s readings of about 269,000 jobless claims, this week’s rise was not unexpected and was thus not reacted to much by the global marketplace. Recent employment data from the United States has been upbeat in nature and is expected to continue that way throughout the rest of the summer and year.

Though improving readings on jobless claims in the United States may lead one to believe that the Fed may soon pull the trigger on interest rate hikes, I do not think such will be the case. We recently received word that the Fed is taking a more cautious approach to rate hikes, and we may not see them occur until after the summer. In fact, there are a good number of people who believe that we will be waiting until sometime in 2016 until we see interest rate hikes. Going forward, however, you can expect that the market will continue to keep a close eye on the employment situation across the United States.

Greece Remains Hot Topic

To describe the market’s focus on Greece’s debt issues as a hot topic is a bit of a misnomer simply because not too much is happening with that situation. At the beginning of the week we learned that Greece recently submitted a new proposal for debt repayments, but the IMF and other creditors have yet to react. As we have been saying for the last few weeks, the clock is running out on Greece and they are quickly going to be faced with an exit from the European Union.

Greece and their creditors are continuing to battle over the way in which debts are paid, though at this point it seems like a one-sided battle more than anything else. Athens seems to not really care if they are ousted from the EU seeing as they are not willing to cooperate with creditors in order to unlock more bailout funds. The precious metals market has more or less stopped reacting to this situation as most people are simply waiting for a concrete solution, or lack thereof, to be made public. My hope is that by this time next week we will not have to speak about Greece and their financial problems anymore.

Wrap-Up

As we look ahead to the final day of the week, there really isn’t all that much for us to look forward to. There is almost no markets-moving economic data on the slate, and I think that will be reflected in the lack of price action on the part of precious metals. There still exists a hope that we will find out some more information regarding what Greece and their creditors are going to do moving forward, but I am not getting my hopes up because we have been let down far too many times in the past.