Gold & Silver Bounce Hard as Wall Street Says "Sorry"

From Chris Mullen at GoldSeek.com...

Gold fell a few dollars further early Wednesday, dropping as low as $1125.90 in Asia and then rebounding in London to see a gain at $1137.05 by the start of New York trade.

Gold then fell to see over 1% losses at a new session low of $1118.50 by around 10:30 EST, but it stormed back higher in the last few hours of trade and ended at its late session high of $1137.40 with a gain of 0.7% on the day.

The Gold Price in Euros rose to €784 an ounce.

Silver prices rose almost 1% as high as $18.465 by about 10:00 EST before it also fell back off in late morning New York trade, dropping as low as $18.17 at one point.

Silver then rallied to a new session high of $18.59 by early afternoon and ended with a gain of 1.4%.

Platinum gained $5.50 to $1570, and copper gained 5 cents to about $3.39.

Gold Mining and silver equities saw slight gains at the open before they fell to see almost 2% losses by midmorning, but they then rallied back higher for most of the rest of trade and ended with over 1% gains.

Oil fell back below $80 after the Energy Information Administration reported that US crude inventories rose a much larger than expected 3.7 million barrels last week. Gasoline inventories rose 3.8 million barrels, and distillates rose 1.4 million barrels.

The US Dollar index fell on the view that other world central banks will raise their interest rates sooner and higher than the Fed.

Treasuries remained modestly lower after Wednesday's $21.0 billion auction of 10-year notes saw a high yield of 3.754% with a strong bid-to-cover ratio of 3.00.

Washington's latest Budget report showed a smaller than expected deficit beneath $92 billion for Dec., down from $120bn in Nov.

The Dow, Nasdaq, and S&P rose to add after the congressional grilling of financial CEOs did not go as bad as some expected.

Wall Street's top executives said they "underestimated" the risks in the financial system ahead of 2008, and apologized for risky behavior and poor decisions.

The Federal Reserve's Beige Book "indicated that while economic activity remains at a low level, conditions have improved modestly further, and those improvements are broader geographically than in the last report."

Thursday at 08:30 EST brings Initial US Jobless Claims for last week, expected at 436,000; Export and Import Prices for Dec; and Retail Sales for December, expected 0.5% higher.

Excluding autos, retail sales are expected to have grown 0.3%. Then at 10:00 comes the Business Inventories report for November, expected at 0.3%.

Among the big names making news in the market today were Kraft, Google, and Bank of America.

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