On Thursday (August 24th), the World Central Bank Seminar at Jackson Hole was about to be held, and gold trading was cautious. The closing price was basically the same as that of the previous trading day at $1916.52 per ounce. interval between 1911-1923).
Initial claims for state unemployment benefits fell 10,000 to a seasonally adjusted 230,000 for the week ended Aug. 19. Economists polled by Reuters had expected 240,000 new claims in the latest week. The jobless benefits report may have also provided some support for the dollar on the day, but overall the gold market's reaction to the data was subdued. The Jackson Hole seminar is the main focus of the current market. Investors awaited Powell's speech on monetary policy at 10:05 a.m. ET on Friday for a glimpse of the Fed's thinking on whether it is close to completing its rate hike campaign and how long it plans to keep rates high. The current United States is full of hard-to-see scenes. On the one hand, the labor market is still tight and consumer confidence remains strong. It is certain that there is still a long way to go to bring the inflation rate back to the Fed’s 2% target. This may prompt this round of tightening to continue. It's not time to relax. Weak PMI and CPI decline, as well as the downward trend of economic development in some other areas, reflect the continuous increase of interest rates, which has begun to hinder economic development, and the debate on whether the US economic outlook will fall into recession is becoming increasingly fierce. Former St. Louis Fed president and current dean of Purdue University's Daniels School of Business, Bullard, said in an exclusive interview with the "Wall Street Journal" that the U.S. economy faces risks to strong growth, which may increase the need for the central bank to raise interest rates further. Bullard dismissed overblown recession forecasts, stressing that the risks are not as dire as some on Wall Street believe. For this reason, Powell's speech at the Jackson Hole meeting this Friday will highly attract investors' attention. At the July monetary policy meeting, Powell had commented that if the economic data remained encouraging, there would be more rate hikes. In view of the recent poor performance of economic data, some institutional analysts expect Powell to support the need to maintain a higher interest rate level for a longer period of time at the Jackson Hole meeting, rather than choose to further tighten monetary policy. After the fight, if the data reflecting inflation and economic development continue to show poor performance, it will increase the expectation that the US interest rate has reached its peak. In this way, there may be rising support factors in the gold market outlook. However, due to the restraint of the high interest rate of the US dollar, the rise of gold is still limited.
On the technical level, international gold surged and fell back on Thursday to maintain a volatile trend, and the volatile range narrowed to between 1911-1923. On the 4-hour chart, the top still failed to effectively break through the recent initial resistance level of $1,920, and the technical indicator MACD has a tendency to become a dead cross. RSI has begun to fall from the oversold area, and there are signs of top divergence. Indicates that gold has not lifted the downside threat in the short term. Only by crossing 1920 above, may it be expected to go higher and return to the 1945-1950 area. If not, there is a greater probability that the market outlook will continue to fluctuate in a low range.
