Gold and silver suffered minor losses by the end of the day on Friday after a week that saw spot values of both gold and silver ping-pong considerably. The main pieces of information on investor’s minds were two stories that took place in the United States. The first of these stories was the Federal Open Market Committee’s scheduled meeting, which was set to take place Friday while the second was the release of the latest US jobs report on Friday.

Both stories were expected to be indicative of an improving US economy and thus adversarial to the spot value of gold and silver.

Latest Jobs Data

Usually, the end of the month brings with it a report on the status of labor in the United States, and this month was no different. Since last week investors have been anxiously awaiting the release of job data that, top many, was expected to be incredibly positive.

In the lead-up to Friday’s meetings, the general consensus was that non-farm payrolls were going to rise to the tune of 175,000. If this was the case, it was also anticipated that the overall unemployment rate would fall from 7.6% to 7.5%. While this would be good news for the average American citizen, this type of news would be negative in terms of the spot price of gold and silver.

When Friday came around the jobs data was released and actual figures came short of expectations because non-farm payrolls only rose by about 162,000. While this number was still good enough to bring the unemployment rate down by the expected amount, it was slightly beneficial for precious metals due to the fact that the data was weaker than expected.

Federal Open Market Committee Scheduled Meeting

Over the course of the past few months, you would be hard-pressed to look back and find more than two consecutive weeks where investors were not waiting to hear from the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee. This week did not break tradition seeing as the FOMC was set to meet on Friday to discuss monetary policy.

What was different, however, was the fact that no major news was expected to be announced. Instead, investors geared up for a meeting that would more or less reiterate what Ben Bernanke had to say to the world only a few weeks ago. Anxious investors had their prayers answered because the prepared text for Friday’s scheduled meeting was released early, on Wednesday. What was expected happened in that the FOMC more or less restated almost everything Ben Bernanke said a couple weeks ago. All in all the meeting and its prepared text was beneficial for gold and silver, though only slightly.