Precious metals spot values have bounced back as of mid-morning on Friday, thanks, in large part, to today’s employment report from October. Even without today’s employment report, this week was extremely busy and had the attention of investors jumping all over the place. Unfortunately for gold and silver, most of the happenings worth paying attention to this week worked against spot values and only worsened last week’s losses.

In case you missed it, Tuesday’s midterm elections in the United States saw the Republican party seize control of both the House and the Senate. This is significant because it is the first time in decades that one party has control of both the House and the Senate, but is also significant because Republicans are viewed as being pro-business and generally better for economic growth. As you could have probably guessed, Tuesday’s election results gave the greenback as well as US equities a boost, but did not do gold and silver any favors at all.

Today’s Employment Data Mostly Disappoints

While there were a few anxiously-awaited pieces of economic data due for release this week, none of them were deemed by the market as being more important than today’s employment data from last month. According to a midweek survey of industry experts, the expectations were that October saw at least 230,000 new jobs added to the US economy. This may seem like a massive estimate, and is, but after September’s employment report showed that almost 250,000 new jobs were created, it really comes as no surprise that expectations were so lofty.

Unfortunately, today’s employment report disappointed due to the fact that only about 214,000 new jobs were added to the economy during October. This figure was much smaller than what was expected and ended up temporarily hurting the progress of both the US Dollar as well as US equities. For gold and silver, however, today’s employment report offered a bit of respite from recent losses as both metals were able to regain some of the losses they have incurred over the course of the past week or more.

Now, as we look ahead to next week, it is highly likely that the attention of investors will be directed towards the global equity and currency markets. As it stands, the US Dollar is performing extremely well against rivals, while the Euro is doing miserably. A strong US Dollar is not helping gold and silver at all, but perhaps what is hurting more is the continued depreciation of crude oil. The value of crude oil has been on the decline for the past few weeks and is really acting like a weight on all commodities, including precious metals.