Precious metals news

Deloitte's job cuts come just four days after Ernst & Young, another Big Four consulting giant, announced a similar measure, while citing "overcapacity" for laying off about 3,000 employees in the United States.

The workforce reductions are in addition to the 2,500 manufacturing jobs the company said it would eliminate in January.

UBS said on Tuesday it had set aside more money to draw a line under its involvement in toxic U.S. mortgages, halving its first-quarter profit as the bank girds itself for the "hard" task of swallowing fallen rival Credit Suisse. Sergio Ermotti, brought back as UBS chief executive to steer the takeover, said it aims to close the deal with fellow Zurich-based bank Credit Suisse by May but warned that it could take four years for a full integration. Meanwhile, the Herculean task of absorbing Credit Suisse includes dealing with a backlash against the deal at home, where thousands of jobs cuts are feared.

The European Central Bank will almost certainly add 25 basis points to its deposit rate on May 4 and then take it to 3.50% or higher in June as core inflation remains persistently high, according to economists polled by Reuters. Euro zone headline inflation moderated further last month but remained over three times the ECB's 2% target and despite core readings rising to a record high...

In a sign fears about the global financial system have eased for now, major central banks are scaling back their offer of emergency dollar loans to banks, a crisis step launched after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in the U.S. fed fears about wider troubles. The European Central Bank said Tuesday that it and other central banks found that pressure on banks' cash...

The world's top central banks will reduce the frequency of their dollar operations with the U.S. Federal Reserve from May 1 after volatility in financial markets receded, the banks said in a joint statement on Tuesday. The European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of England and the Swiss National Bank have been conducting daily dollar swaps with the Fed for the past...

In March, UK inflation continued to hover in the double-digit range as households grappled with the persistently high cost of living. Among the various expenses challenging British consumers' wallets, the price of an English breakfast has notably soared.

British grocery inflation edged lower in April but remained near record highs, industry data showed on Tuesday, providing little relief for consumers being hammered by a cost-of-living crisis.

Hungary will probably take a first step in dismantling its emergency monetary regime that has shored up the currency but has so far failed to make a major dent in the European Union’s highest inflation.

A selloff in Chinese equities is deepening as a barrage of economic and geopolitical risks stack up, with global funds accelerating their exodus.

The Federal Reserve and global counterparts will revert to fewer auctions for dollar funding after financial-market tensions in the wake of US bank failures subsided.

The rebound in European equities since mid-March has failed to win over strategists, who predict that the sustained campaign of central-bank interest rate hikes will stall the rally.

US equity futures declined along with European stocks as investors scrutinized a flood of corporate earnings for clues on the outlook for the global economy amid high interest rates and inflation.

Global stock markets and Wall Street futures are lower as investors await U.S. earnings reports and an update on economic growth

Silver delivery from the COMEX was low in April, but there is more to the story.
This analysis focuses on gold and silver within the Comex/CME futures exchange. See the article What is the Comex? for more detail. The charts and tables below specifically analyze the physical stock/inventory data at the Comex to show the physical movement of metal into and out of Comex vaults.

Last week, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves signed a bill into law exempting the sale of gold and silver from the state sales tax. Repealing the sales tax will relieve some of the tax burdens on investors, and take a step toward treating gold and silver as money instead of as commodities.

Americans continue to deal with rising prices even as the economy deteriorates. But the US isn't the only country with an inflation problem. As Peter Schiff explained in a recent podcast, every country has let the inflation horses out of the barn. When you couple that with the de-dollarization trend, it's bullish for gold.

Silver is headed to record levels within the next 36 months, according to a veteran commodities analyst. But when it happens don’t expect shocking newspaper headlines.

Central bankers who manage trillions in foreign exchange reserves are loading up on gold as geopolitical tensions including the war in Ukraine force them to rethink their investment strategies.

The survey then goes on to (try to) explain that despite the axiom of the law of supply and demand that more demand than supply (by a large margin) must result in higher prices, that silver prices were lower on average over the year 2022 than the year before.