Gold and silver have had an up and down last few days as final numbers are making it difficult to determine if this week is going to be one of gains or losses for both gold and silver. Thus far this week we have paid attention to two major news stories, one out of Asia and the other out of the United States.
With the Federal Reserve’s next meeting set to take place in September, this week marked when the meeting’s minutes were to be released. In addition to this news, an ongoing, and growing, Asian currency predicament is slowly but surely catching the world’s attention.
Asian Currency Crisis
Increasing interest rates in more developed countries of the world such as the US and Germany are causing investors to lose interest in lower to mid-level currencies. This growing disinterest has done a very good job of killing the value of many Asian currencies. The two most hardest hit currencies are the Indian Rupee and the Indonesian Rupiah. At about the same time as gold and silvers’ epic climb last week, these two currencies began depreciating rapidly before hitting all-time lows against the US Dollar.
When the story first broke it was overshadowed by the rising spot prices of gold and silver, though as the decline of the Rupee and Rupiah continued into this week, the story gained more attention. Now, Indian and Indonesian officials are doing everything they can to help alleviate the selling pressure their currencies are under, though up to this point nothing has worked. As the days move forward the two currencies remain in their subdued positions with no clear end to this decline in sight. We, and investors all over the world, will continue to monitor this situation in search of any further developments.
FOMC Minutes
It seems as though the Fed is in the news almost weekly, and as fate would have it, this week is no exception. This time around investors awaited the minutes from the Fed’s upcoming September meeting.
While the Fed’s meeting’s minutes are always something investors pay attention to, this time around they carried more weight as many had suspected that the text would reveal some news in regards to the future of monetary policy in the United States. Unfortunately, however, the minutes proved to be nothing short of a disappointment as they offered no clear information regarding QE’s future.
Instead, there is a growing sense of uneasiness as the Fed seems incapable of reaching a consensus agreement on anything. Now investors will have to wait for September’s meeting, a meeting that will hopefully shed some light on what the future has in store for QE, if anything at all.