Chart Of The Day: Fed's Rate Message Powers Gold Higher

 | Apr 29, 2021 14:35

Yesterday, gold got a boost from Fed Chair Jerome Powell, during his monthly, post-FOMC meeting press conference. Once again, he downplayed the inflationary pressures seen recently in the US economic data.

“It's not time to start talking about tapering," he said. After which he added:

"We'll let the public know well in advance. It will take some time before we see substantial further progress. We had one great jobs report. It is not enough to start talking about tapering. We'll need to see more data."

Referring to the personal consumption expenditure metric, which the US central bank favors as an inflation indicator, Powell said:

"PCE inflation is expected to move above 2% in the near term. But these one-time increases in prices are likely to have only transitory effects on inflation.”

The reason the Fed has been so vocal about the insignificance of this inflation is that the YoY comparison is to 2020, when the economy came to a standstill at the height of the COVID-19 outbreak. That's because there's nothing impressive about data that's higher than normal when it's compared to a period that was significantly below normal in myriad ways.

As well, the running assumption by policy makers is that after consumers unleash pent up demand, it will temper, especially when government stimulus checks stop coming.

With fears that inflation will force the Fed to raise interest rates dissipating, continued near-zero rates make gold look attractive again.

All this has added momentum to the yellow metal's short-term uptrend. Traders can take advantage of this in one of two ways: either ride the trend higher or get ready for a medium-term short position before the precious metal tests the long-term uptrend.