By Geoffrey Smith
Investing.com -- Gold prices rose on Tuesday against a backdrop of more miserable high-frequency economic data, but silver grabbed the spotlight with another sharp increase that brough the gold-silver price ratio back under 100.
Analysts have argued that that ratio has been trading well above its historical range of 60 to 80, as the flood of money into bullion this year has overwhelmingly favored gold. The only question was whether the mean reversion would take the form of a gold sell-off or a silver rally.
By 11 AM ET (1500 GMT), gold futures for delivery on the Comex exchange were up 0.8% at $1,748.85 a troy ounce, while spot gold was up 0.4% at $1,744.01 an ounce.
Silver futures, meanwhile, were up 2.4 at $17.89 an ounce, having earlier hit $17.95, their highest since late February. Copper futures, by contrast, failed again at the $2.43 level, to trade up only 0.4% at $2.42 a pound.
Platinum and palladium futures were better bid against the backdrop of production restarts by global automakers, with the former rising 2.4% to $890.80 an ounce and palladium rising 4.6% to $2,119.80 an ounce. Platinum is now up 16% in the last week alone, while palladium is up 15.4%. That's despite the fact that car inventories have hardly fallen during the lockdowns: U.K. and Italian car sales fell 97% in April, while French and German sales were hardly better.
The moves took place against a backdrop of more dire economic data: earlier in the day, the U.K. jobless rolls expanded by 70% to a decade high, while a rise in the German ZEW sentiment index masked a further deterioration in the assessment of current conditions. In the U.S., meanwhile, housing starts slumped by over 25% in April.
The market was unwilling to bet on further stimulus as a result of the numbers, though. The opening session of Congressional testimony by Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell added little to his recent comments.
“There is a limit to what central bankers can say at the moment,” said Paul Donovan, chief economist of UBS Wealth Management, in a morning note. “Beyond providing liquidity as needed and ensuring markets are functioning, all central bankers can do is to urge a fiscal policy response. Governments around the world have taken away income from individuals and businesses. It is up to governments, not central banks, to restore that income.”