The yellow precious metal rose faintly while crude narrow traded today in New York as a result of mixed sentiments still reining the commodities market after yesterday’s minutes meeting release and today’s report that showed a cheerful strong decline of the U.S jobless claims.
In fact number of Americans who filed for unemployment insurance claims fell to the lowest level since before the financial crisis, indicating superior improvement in the labor sector.
Initial jobless claims fell 32,000 to 300,000 in the week-ended April 5, the lowest since May 2007, which was way better than estimates that called for jobless claims of 320,000.
Not forgetting that in minutes of the Federal Reserve meeting published yesterday, several participants said forecasts "overstated the shift in the projections," suggesting the Fed is not as eager to tighten policy as the rate forecasts had seemed to suggest, and are still looking for further improvement in the economy and especially the labor market.
The four-week average of jobless claims, a less-volatile measure than the weekly initial jobless claims numbers, fell to 316,520, the lowest since late September, from 321,000 the previous week.
In another report today, Labor Department figures showed import prices climbed for a fourth month in March, led by higher costs of food, fuels and industrial supplies. The gauge rose 0.6 percent from a month earlier. Compared with March 2013, costs declined 0.6 percent.
Accordingly the gold is so far trading around $1303.80 an ounce recording a high of $1306.85 an ounce and a low of $1277.65 an ounce and crude is trading around $101.22 a barrel recording a high of $101.60 a barrel and a low of $100.28 a barrel.
Moreover this week’s EIA report showed that the U.S commercial crude oil inventories increased by 4.0 million barrels from the previous week. At 384.1 million barrels while that the total motor gasoline inventories decreased by 5.2 million barrels last week.
Plus finished gasoline inventories increased while blending components inventories both decreased last week and distillate fuel inventories increased by 0.2 million barrels last week and are near the lower limit of the average range for the time of the year.