 | Get all the essential market news and expert opinions in one place with our daily newsletter. Receive a comprehensive recap of the day's top stories directly to your inbox. Sign up here! |
(Kitco News) - The gold market remains under pressure and is seeing little reaction to forward-looking labor market data that showed a drop in available jobs.
Job openings, a measure of labor demand, fell to 9.82 million on the last day of June, the Labor Department said in its monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS report, on Thursday.
The data missed expectations as economists were looking for job openings to drop to 9.93 million, down only slightly from May's report of 10.10 million job openings.
The gold market is not seeing much reaction to the latest labor market data as prices remain under solid selling pressure after ADP said that the U.S. economy created nearly 500,000 private-sector jobs in June, significantly beating expectations.
August gold futures last traded at $1,914 an ounce, down 0.68% on the day.
Some economists note that JOLTS is a forward-looking indicator, and the fact that the number of job openings has declined sharply could indicate that the labor market is losing some momentum.
However, some market analysts also note that one component of the report continues to highlight labor market strength. The report said that the number and rate of quits increased to 4.0 million.
"The quits rate moving higher is indicative of a stronger jobs industry. People normally don't quit their job when jobs are not available," said Greg Michalowski, currency analyst at Forexlive.com.
