Today’s Economic Shakers

Gold and silver shoot higher as Trump says US dollar too strong…

Gold, which has been trending bullish for the last month, received an additional boost yesterday afternoon as Trump stated to the Wall Street Journal that he thought the dollar was “getting too strong.”

Following Trump’s declaration, gold rose to $1,276, placing the commodity at its highest level in more than 5 months.

Traders continued to favor the precious metal in early Thursday trading as well, sending gold up by 0.75% before Wall Street’s opening bell. That brought the commodity up to $1,287, which was the highest level reached since early November of last year.

Gold had already seen its price rise over the last week as geopolitical events, including tensions with North Korea and Russia, as well as the Syrian conflict, have led investors to shift capital from out of equities to safe havens such as gold and short-term Treasuries.

Silver also benefited from investor concerns regarding the global political picture as well as the President’s currency comments, with futures contracts for the current month gaining 1.5%, hitting as high as $18.60 an ounce.

The widely-traded ETF, iShares Silver Trust, gained 0.90% prior to today’s opening bell.

Meanwhile, the dollar got smacked down in response to Trump’s comment, driving it down to the lowest level against the yen since November 2016.

The ICE Dollar index fell by 0.22% this morning, which placed the US currency at its lowest levels since the start of this month.

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March wholesale prices tumbled for the first time in 8 months...

On Thursday morning the Labor Department issued its monthly wholesale prices report for March and the data revealed that the US has experienced its first decline in wholesale costs since August of last year.

A continued decline in the key metric could influence the Federal Reserve’s current strategy of raising interest rates at an accelerated pace, as maintaining inflation at its targeted goal of 2% is considered a large factor in how it proceeds with its monetary policies.

The government report showed that its producer-price index (PPI) had declined by 0.1%, which was below forecasts that had predicted no change in that category.

As a comparison, February had seen a rise of 0.3% in the PPI.

Additionally, the Labor Department report said that wholesale prices had increased by 2.3% as compared to the previous year. That sharp rise had been the biggest jump since 2012.

The data for March showed that the core PPI, which excludes the more volatile components of food and energy, had remained unchanged from February, but had seen a gain of 1.6% as compared to the same month in 2016.

Regarding those two components, the report said that the cost of food had increased by 0.9%, while energy prices declined by a sharp 2.9%, both as compared to February’s numbers.

All told, inflation maintained the Fed’s target of 2%, based on the total PPI numbers. However, the Fed tends to prefer the core PPI data as a more accurate read on inflation, and that metric failed to meet the central bank’s target.