Precious Metals Suffer in Wider Asset Sell-off

Greek debt woes were back in the driving seat on Tuesday as fears that the latest deal with Greek government bondholders bubbled up driving equities lower led by banking stocks.

Bondholders must sign up to the proposed deal by Thursday in order to swap their existing Greek sovereign bonds for debt that pays lower interest. Without the debt swap, and the bailout, the Greek government will likely default on its debt commitments this month.

As we have seen so many times before, weakness in share markets spilled over into precious metals with Gold and Silver both down sharply, though by Tuesday evening in London, both precious metals had recovered slightly from their lows.

Sentiment was still fragile after the falls last week driven by Ben Bernanke's indications of an end to quantitative easing.

Traffic at BullionSupermarket.com was up on the average as bargain hunters came looking for bargains, mostly in ending auctions.

Availability of 1 Ounce Gold Eagles as well as other benchmark Gold Bullion was significantly up on the day and may contribute to further buying opportunities for physical coin and bar buyers moving forward.