Precious metals end 0.3% lower

Silver prices ended a eleven day winning streak

Bullion prices ended lower on Wednesday, 19 February 2014. Gold futures settled lower on Wednesday and lost even more ground after minutes from the Federal Reserve's January meeting showed that central-bank officials couldn't agree on the outlook for short-term interest rates and some questioned continuing the pace of reductions to asset purchases.

Gold for April delivery fell $4, or 0.3%, to settle at $1,320.40 an ounce on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange, before the Fed minutes were released.

Also on Comex, March silver fell nearly 5 cents, or 0.2%, to settle at $21.85 an ounce. Prices ended a 11 day winning streak.

Wednesday afternoon's release of the minutes of the latest meeting of the Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee (FOMC) revealed no major surprises. Two Federal Reserve officials on Wednesday said it would take a significant change in FOMC member attitudes to pull the tapering of the monthly bond-buying program off the tableeven with some recent weaker U.S. economic data released.

In other news Wednesday, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) released a report that said the Fund is worried about the emerging markets, given the recent turmoil with some emerging market currencies. The IMF warned about inflation in the emerging market countries and warned about deflation in the European Unioncalling the potential EU deflation a new risk to the global economy.

Today's economic data at Wall Street included two reports. Housing starts fell 16% in January, from an upwardly revised 1.048 million (from 999,000) in December to 880,000. The consensus expected housing starts to fall to 963,000. There are some questions about how much of a role the adverse weather played in the decline.

Separate report showed that January PPI increased 0.2% after ticking up 0.1% in December. The consensus expected the PPI to increase 0.2%. Prices of final demand goods increased 0.4% in January after increasing by the same amount in December. Energy price growth softened, up 0.3% in January after increasing 1.5% in December. Much of the gain in the final demand goods index was due to a 2.7% increase in pharmaceutical preparations.

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