From an economic activity standpoint, this week will be much quieter than last week was. In fact, the first two days of this week have been extremely quiet and while this is unnerving for some investors, it has worked out positively for gold and silver spot values. Despite recent gains, precious metals are still fairly inexpensive and are drawing the attention of a large number of investors who are actively looking to ditch risky investments in search of safer, more secure ones.

Unfortunately, this week is not expected to bring about much markets-moving economic data and, thus, the attention of the market will remain firmly fixated on the progress, or lack thereof, of US equity markets. Not only that, but investors will also be paying close attention to how the USD performs as well. Up until about a week or so ago, both of the aforementioned asset classes were performing extremely well, but recently all that has changed as the Fed continues to delay its hiking of interest rates in the United States.

Federal Reserve Remains In the Spotlight

With there being such limited economic activity expected to take place this week, the focus of investors, in addition to being latched on to US equities, will be on the Federal Reserve and what it plans to do going forward. Barely more than a month ago most investors were confident that interest rate hikes would be introduced by sometime next summer, but that has all changed. Now, due to the slowing economic growth of places like Europe and Asia, the market is not expecting such interest rate announcements to be heard until this time next year, at the earliest.

The uncertainty with regard to rate hikes combined with the recent volatility of the US stocks and the US Dollar has translated into a current market atmosphere that is beneficial for gold and silver. Because of all this uncertainty, the attraction to low-cost gold and silver is simply too much for some investors to shy away from. For this reason, no one would be too surprised to see the spot value of gold and silver continually rise over the course of the next few days and weeks.