Gold

For a variety of factors, westerners tend to view China’s rise to the top as inevitable. However, this certainly isn’t so when looking at the world’s supposedly second-largest economy. Today saw the Shanghai and CSI indexes plunge more than 6% each.

Gold is holding a very fine gain despite the fact that the U.S. dollar has recovered some its losses. We need to be wary of what lies over the horizon, however, and we do mean the immediate horizon.

Markets are by nature reactionary. So, if today gold bulls are bidding up the yellow precious metal we can count on profit taking, if not tomorrow, then shortly thereafter.

We think that in the FOMC press release (which you can read in its entirety below with significant phrases and words bolded), the seeds can be found of a further pushing back of a Federal Reserve interest-rate hike until December. Strikingly, the most important sentence of the release is contained in the last paragraph.

With the June FOMC meeting in focus today, we expect markets to remain somewhat range bound until Chairwoman Janet Yellen’s news conference tomorrow in midafternoon.

Gold rose today on a fairly strong movement toward haven demand due to the Greek debt crisis. That problem also drove down equities on all major exchanges across the world. However, as we head into the afternoon, gold (and silver) are off their earlier highs.

We might as well begin with Greece and try to explain the unexplainable.

The outlook for a positive resolution of the Greek debt fiasco grows gloomier and gloomier. This spooked U.S. and European equities, the DJIA falling hardest with a loss of almost 0.9%. Normally, this would signal a cakewalk for gold.

Try as regular traders might today, they couldn’t overcome the resurgent dollar. And, in spite of bellicose words from the IMF, the EU and Greece, equities worldwide managed to pick up some gains. Gold gained nothing on the safe-haven play from the unsettled Greek debt problem today, however.

A Greek deal is looking more and more unlikely. The Greeks simply do not want to accept austerity as defined by core players in the monetary union, France and Germany. Even the very next meeting is in doubt because of Greek recalcitrance.

A Greek deal is looking more and more unlikely. The Greeks simply do not want to accept austerity as defined by core players in the monetary union, France and Germany. Even the very next meeting is in doubt because of Greek recalcitrance.

Purportedly, Diogenes, a 4th century Greek philosopher of the Cynic school, went about Athens in the daytime with a lighted lamp looking for an honest man. What better place today to start than modern Greece, which apparently cannot find its “honest man” in debt negotiations with the rest of Europe, the IMF and other creditor entities?