Markets Warm Up to Bernanke Speech

It took a little while for traders to sift through Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s latest musings on monetary policy at the zero interest rate bound as detailed here or, perhaps, they just scanned Rex Nutting’s MarketWatch column in which he declared the Fed “will soon fire off another round of bond-buying in an effort to goose the economy and bring down the unemployment rate “, but, whatever the case, financial markets shrugged off their early concerns to move sharply higher, notably gold as shown below.

Of course, silver is doing even better as nearly all stocks and commodities are moving higher on this final low-volume trading day of August. With markets closed on Monday and vacationing traders returning to their stations on Tuesday, September might usher in a whole new interpretation of the Fed Chief’s remarks.