Today Germany will hold a 5-yer bond auction to the amount of 4B euro. Spanish and Italian bond auctions are scheduled for tomorrow. The countries are planning to attract 17B euro from today’s bond sales. The eurozone GDP report is scheduled for today. Yesterday’s data on France’s manufacturing production came out much better than expected (+1.1% in Dec).
Some sources report that Italian mafia’s turnover is roughly equal to 140B euro a year, with the net profit around 100B euro (or 7% of the GDP). Strange as it may seem, but the mafia is the country’s biggest “bank”. The mafia’s income will only grow because of lending reduction by Italian banks.
The EU minifins will meet a week earlier than planned, on Jan 23rd, in order to discuss the Iran oil issue. Japan supports the idea of switching to the crude oil exported from Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
The Federal Reserve is going to transfer $76.9B of its income to the US treasury. The bank’s balance sheet in 2011 was equal to $2.9 trillion thanks to the purchases of US T-bonds.
India has expanded the list of banks that can import precious metals. The country’s central bank hopes that tougher competition will lower the premium for physical gold. In 2011 India imported 878 tons of gold as compared to 958ttons imported in 2010.
Against this background, yesterday gold and silver hit this year’s new highs.
Forecast: According to the Department of Commodity Trading of , in order to continue the rally, gold needs to close the H1 bar above 1639.50. Until then there is a chance of going down to 1625, 1618, 1610, especially if within a few hours any H1 bar closes below 1634. If the price consolidates above 1639.50, the closest targets will be around 1650, 1657, 1668.
As for silver, it has been retracing form yesterday’s high since early morning. The closest retracement targets are 29.50, 29.30. In order to resume the rally, silver will need to break and consolidate above 30.05. A successful break will give way to 30.50-30.65.
