Gold Spot Price Open: $1,323

Gold Spot Price Close: $1,337

Change in Gold Spot Price: +$14

Silver Spot Price Open: $21.77

Silver Spot Price Close: $21.82

Change in Silver Spot Price:+$0.05

Gold and silver made some minor gains to close out the week on Friday. Though both metals moved up and down quite drastically over the course of the past 5 days, they finished the week in more or less  the same positions they were in when the week started. At the end of the day Friday, however, gold picked up about 14 dollars while silver gained 5 cents.

While yesterday’s Fed Speak saw the Richmond Federal Reserve president, Jeffrey Lacker, indicate that he was shocked by the FOMC’s decision last week, today yielded a completely different story. President of the Chicago Federal Reserve bank, Charles Evans, said that the Fed may not begin to wind down Quantitative Easing until sometime in 2014. He went on to say that the current economic atmosphere is too unstable to be completely confident in a reduction of the Fed’s $80+ billion monthly bond-buying program.

The upcoming budget deadline is fast approaching and if the US Congress cannot come to an agreement in regards to the US budget by this upcoming Tuesday, the government will be forced into a shutdown. You would think that the upcoming deadline would spur Congress into productive action, though it is seeming more and more like the opposite is true. If a decision about the budget is not reached by next Tuesday we will see the US government forced to shut down for the first time in a long while.

Immediately after the US budget issue is resolved, the government has to address the fact that they will have reached their borrowing limit by the middle of October. It will be interesting to see if gold and silver will follow suit with most other markets which are expected to decline in the midst of a government shutdown or if the metals will act as safe haven assets.