The Best Reason For Buying Gold Right Now Is? None.

A weaker dollar and reluctant buyers in the gold market faced off against one another today. The result is a narrowly higher price in gold.

Gold traders tend to enter a market (from either side) based on events.

Outflows were seen in the world's top gold-backed ETF, the SPDR Gold Trust. Holdings fell 0.17% to their lowest since mid-January at 708.70 tons on Friday. (It was later in January of this year that gold last traded in the 1300 range.

There are also more interpretations of the smoke signals sent out by Friday’s job-creation number, which came in well above what was projected. Equities seem to be continuing their view that any rate increase is a bad increase, or, which is even more likely in their minds, analysts believe that the first rate hike will open the door to more. And more. And more.

Our read is that even if the Fed raises rates in the third or fourth quarter of 2015, it will be, for all intents and purposes, a one off.

Surely at least one meeting will be skipped before the U.S. central bank offers a second bump of 25 basis points. One should figure that if a first rate hike is announced, it will taker a solid month for the new rate’s effect to have any impact whatsoever on the broader marketplace, and it would take as much as four to six months before it was really felt by consumers.

Acting quickly on a second hike would be irresponsible and invite disaster. So, let’s say that the first rise comes in December. We feel it would be April before a second boost could even be vaguely possible. And then, one would come if there were no negative impact on the U.S. and worldwide economy.

Elsewhere, oil dropped, largely on news that China continues to curb imports. China, the top net oil importer in the world, bought about 25% less crude oil in May than it did in April, official data showed on Monday. In the overall oil products category, imports fell by more than 6 percent, against a 10 percent drop in Chinese exports.

Even a 1.3% drop in the dollar wasn’t enough to offset the China news and the news that OPEC will continue to pump and party like it’s 1999.

The drop in Chinese oil imports should also tell us something larger about China growth, namely that it is mired in stagnation (by that country’s standards). We’ve said a number of times that virtually all second-world economies attempting to vault into the first world, run up against a glass ceiling.

This can be due to any number of facts: corruption (Russia, India); a closed political system (China); income inequality (all of the three already cited); and overinflated credit markets  (China).

There is also the matter of intellectual infrastructure lagging. While it appears that many second-world economies are doing a better job with education than the industrialized world, sometimes those attainments are less than spectacular. While certainly all the countries mentioned turn out brilliant engineers and scientists, most degrees awarded in those areas run at about the equivalency of a two-year American college.

In a nutshell, second-world countries’ talent just below the top tier is woeful.

Changing course a bit… while it may be a tad early to be calling “Summer Market,” it is time to ponder the fact that in the U.S. – the hand that still rock’s the world’s economic cradle – about 60% of the nation’s schools are done with this year’s session. In New York City, private schools are scheduled to have their last day of the year this week. Public schools follow ten days later.

Investors, traders and analysts – those whose children populate such schools – will have their SUVs pointed east to the Hamptons, north to the Catskills and Berkshires or toward the airports to take them to the south of France and Tuscany.

You can almost hear the gears grinding into low gear.

Wishing you as always, good trading,