A Podcast from Freedom Fest in Las Vegas

I'm still here in Last Vegas at Freedom Fest, but I wanted to take some time out to come up to my hotel room here and record a short podcast - otherwise I'd have to wait until Tuesday.  There's been a lot of stuff that's happened over the last few days, so I definitely wanted to record something; the quality might not be up to snuff.  But I figured I'd talk a little bit about what's been going on in the market.

The Action Was in the Metals Markets

Really, the stock markets - not much action.  All the major markets finished the day and the week lower; bond prices a bit higher.  The real action, though, was in the metals markets.  You wouldn't really know it to look at the price of gold, which was only up maybe about a dollar or two on the week, although we did have a big $20 rise yesterday, followed by a $20 drop today. I'll get into why that happened in a minute.

Strength in Silver

But the real action was in silver, which finished the week better than up 90 cents, I believe.  So, a very strong week for silver - even on days when gold was down, silver was up. In fact, even this morning, silver was up for a while while gold was down. I titled my last podcast, "Is Silver Finally Joining Gold’s Party?" and, as of now, it really looks like the answer to that question is yes. We've see a lot of strength in silver.

Clarida Shakes Markets with Rate Cut Comments

In fact, we had the biggest two-day gain, going back several years, in the price of silver. The big jump that we has yesterday really was set into motion by some Fed comments, although that probably was just a catalyst; it probably would have moved up anyway. But in particular, we had Clarida came out and he said that the Fed should not wait for the data to turn before cutting rates. Meaning that, "We should cut rates, anyway, even if we don't get negative data; even if it doesn't look like the economy is going into recession, we should just preemptively cut rates."