The Metals: Gold saw modest losses in Asia and traded only slightly lower in London before it dropped throughout most of trade in New York and ended near its noontime low of $1129.85 with a loss of 2.1%. Silver fell to as low as $17.61 by early afternoon in New York and ended with a loss of 4.13%. Euro gold fell to about €842, platinum lost $33 to $1684.50, and copper fell nearly 9 cents to about $3.51. Gold and silver equities fell about 4% by early afternoon before they rallied back higher in the last few hours of trade, but they still ended with over 2% losses. Next week’s economic highlights include Leading Indicators on Monday, Initial Jobless Claims, PPI, Existing Home Sales, and the FHFA Home Price Index on Thursday, and Durable Orders and New Home Sales on Friday. The Markets: Oil fell along with the Dow, Nasdaq, and S&P as the U.S. dollar index and treasuries rose on worries over Goldman’s fraud charge, poor earnings reports, and increased concerns over Greece that sent the euro lower. Among the big names making news in the market Friday were Goldman Sachs (charged with FRAUD by the SEC), Bank of America, GE, Mattel, MetLife, Toyota, and Sony Ericsson. The Commentary: “Gold's open interest for Wednesday's trading showed a decline of 1,983 contracts. Volume was 135,879 contracts. However, silver's open interest went the other direction... up 1,967 contracts on volume of 45,578 contracts, about a third of which were roll overs and probably some spreads. Ted Butler figures that a spread trade was the reason why o.i. rose in silver... as there was nothing in the price action on Wednesday to indicate a jump in o.i. of this size. Today's Commitment of Traders report will be released at precisely 3:30 p.m. Eastern time... and the link to that report is here. The CME Delivery Report showed that 76 gold and zero silver contracts have been posted for delivery on Monday. The GLD ETF showed no changes yesterday...but, once again, the silver ETF stole the show, as the boys and girls over at SLV reported another huge withdrawal... the second in as many days. This time it was 2,157,100 ounces. Since February 26th... 16.7 million ounces of silver have been withdrawn in ten consecutive tranches. That's 5% of SLV's silver removed by 'authorized participants'... almost ten days of world silver production. What entity [or entities] needed silver that badly, or in such a hurry... and how tight must the supply line be if they have to resort to getting it from SLV? I can tell you this, dear reader, if the silver users who have withdrawn this metal from SLV had to source it from the Comex... I can absolutely guarantee that the price of silver would not be $18.50 spot right now! Talking about silver disappearing... the U.S. Mint updated their April sales figures yesterday. They reported that 21,500 gold eagles and another 749,500 silver eagles were sold. This brings April one-ounce gold eagle sales up to 33,500... and silver eagle sales up to 1,147,000. The Comex-approved depositories reported a net inflow of a very tiny 17,950 ounces on Wednesday. But there was a lot of in-and-out movements associated with that small change... and you can view all the action here.”– From Ed Steer’s Gold & Silver Daily, read the full report here.

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