Comments from Fed Chairman Bernanke this morning led traders to believe that the Fed Funds rate isn’t going anywhere anytime soon from its 0% – 0.25% range. As that news began filtering out into the market, the equities moved up off their lows eventually making it into positive territory while the Dollar moved down off its session high. That allowed Gold and the rest of the commodity world to see some buying come back into those markets with gold moving some $13 off its worst levels of the session. Basically it would seem that we are still sitting around watching what the equity and Forex markets are doing to get a clue as to what we can expect gold to do from day to day.

The chatter today outside of the Bernanke comments concerned doubt or at least uncertainty over any potential aid or plan by the ECB to come to the aid of Greece’s debt problems. Those doubts initially were the impetus behind the selling that came back into the Euro after it leapt into the heavens yesterday. It still dumbfounds me how worried traders are over Greece’s woes or even those of the other countries in the basket of what is being referred to as the “PIGS” and how complacently indifferent these same traders/investors are over the much more serious woes of states such as California, Illinois, Michigan, New York and others here in the US. In terms of sheer size of numbers, there is no comparison. Then again as could be said, “Denial is a river in Egypt”.

The seriousness of the problem will be blithely ignored until it simply blows up into a crisis that “Denial” cannot avoid. Then all the lemmings will Gadarene-like rush headlong off the cliff together congratulating themselves for their foresight as they plummet to earth. It’s never the fall that gets ya –it’s that sudden stop at the end.

Bonds were down fairly hard today (for a change) but as of yet are still holding support.

The Dollar remains well above 79 and thus is safe from further long side liquidation until it breeches that level. It continues to bounce off the rising 10 day moving average as technicians buy to defend their massive longs.

Not much to say about the mining shares as evidenced by the HUI which was tracking gold fairly closely today as it too moved off its worst levels of the session. They still look like they are short term sold out to me but bulls are not yet out of the woods until we get a close above 400 at the very least.

It will be interesting to see what kind of big “surprise” Iran has in store for the world tomorrow as they have announced. Never a dull moment these days….”- Dan Norcini