The sweep across northern Iraq by radical Islamists seems to have caught Iraq, the U.S. and its allies off guard and has thrown an element of uncertainty into world affairs.

Gold took advantage of the conditions and zoomed up more than 1%, although it has since fallen back.

The U.S. budget deficit took another bounce down in May, and, of all the leading indicators, that one is crucial.

Why?

Because the whittling away at the federal government's deficit expresses increased tax revenues more than cuts to spending. That means more people are working, more people are buying. More people are active in the economy.

Some influences are temporal.

The president of the St. Louis Fed, James Bullard said that the American economy is nearing normal and a return to business-as-usual monetary policy is in the offing. Essentially, he's calling for higher interest rates sooner, rather than later.

Bullard claims that inflation (even by the standards of government statistics), is nearing the Fed-set target.

Before we start, a word about D-Day, June 6, 1944.

The western allies who landed on the beaches of Normandy helped to save the world from the worst modern menace it has known. Let's remember their courage and sacrifices and remind ourselves we live in a world of their making and not in some Nazi nightmare.

Today's bounce caught many gold bulls off guard. But, when you ponder that the European Central Bank took bolder-than-usual moves - very unexpected given their track record of under-delivering on big promises - traders could only react as quickly as possible.

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No wonder that gold is looking for cues.

There was a landslide of economic data released today in the U.S. and the picture of the economy is blurrier, not clearer, from the snapshot.

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Gold saw a bit of recovery today. about half of it from dollar weakness, half from regular trading. For the moment the bleeding is stanched.

This week is going to see some key economic data released and the waiting game has begun.

If it wasn't pathetic and hadn't affected tens of millions of people, the Institute Of Supply Management's bungling of their own statistics today would be funny.

But their mistake revealed a lot of information to gold traders.

News is a funny beast. We're never sure if events are guiding the news or the news is guiding events. Early in the month, the world was fretting about Ukraine and Russia.