Precious metals made it through the first few days of the week without moving too much at all. As investors were focused on the latest Federal Reserve Open Market Committee meeting through Tuesday and Wednesday. Though no changes were made to monetary policies in the US, what the Fed had to say in their post-meeting statement effectively destroyed gold and silver’s combined hopes of making this week a positive one.

Also in the news this week were plenty of US economic reports, of which had mixed results.

FOMC Meeting and Outcome

As is the case every time the FOMC convenes for a meeting, the world marketplace took their attention off of other matters and focused solely on what the monetary policy-making body of the United States had to say. The meeting kicked off Tuesday morning and lasted until the afternoon on Wednesday. As was expected, the FOMC decided to leave monetary policy unchanged for yet another meeting.

The current monetary policy in the United States, also known as Quantitative Easing, has been in place for the past few years now. The policy functions by having the Fed buy over $80 billion in assets each month in order to add cash to the economy. Thanks to the recent government shutdown, the widely held belief that QE would be wound down or reduced by the year’s end dissipated quickly. However, the Fed’s statement which was released after meeting’s end might have changed that belief one more time.

The Fed stated that while the US economy is not strong enough to merit a reduction or abandonment of QE, it is still showing plenty of signs of growth. This seemingly optimistic outlook on the state of the US economy caused the marketplace to believe, once more, that the Fed may taper QE before the year’s end. Some where so quick to jump to conclusions that they marked the FOMC’s December meeting as a likely time when QE will be reduced. At this point though, anything investors and market watchers have to say regarding QE’s future is pure speculation.

US Economic Data

While there were a number of economic reports released over the past 5 days, no two were more important than October’s employment report and this week’s jobless claims report. The better of the two, the jobless claims report, came out on Thursday and indicated that unemployment claims across the US fell by about 10,000. October’s employment report, on the other hand, showed that non-farm payrolls rose by 20,000 less than what was expected. Though the market was anticipating non-farm payrolls to rise by 150,000, actual figures came in closer to 130,000.