Daily Digest Market Movers: Gold price struggles for firm near-term direction amid Fed rate cut uncertainty

• Investors remain uncertain about the Federal Reserve's rate-cut path, which, in turn, fails to provide any meaningful impetus to the Gold price and leads to subdued range-bound price action.
• The Fed last week lowered its projection for the number of rate cuts in 2024 to one from three in March, though the incoming US macro data keeps hopes alive for the first rate cut in September.
• The bets were lifted by softer US consumer and producer prices data released last week, which suggested that inflation is subsiding, and disappointing US Retail Sales figures on Tuesday. 
• The Commerce Department reported that US Retail Sales rose 0.1% on a monthly basis in May as against the previous month's downwardly revised fall of 0.2% and the 0.2% increase anticipated.
• The softer print pointed to signs of exhaustion among US consumers and that the economic activity was slowing, strengthening the case for the Fed to lower borrowing costs sooner than expected.
• In an interview with Fox Business, New York Fed President John Williams noted that the recent inflation data have been encouraging and added that he expects inflation to continue to come down.
• Richmond Fed President Thomas Barkin said that May inflation data was encouraging but it is hard to know how much signal to take from inflation last year, this quarter, or the last couple of weeks.
• Meanwhile, Boston Fed President Susan Collins said that inflation remains stubbornly high, and it will take more time than many had initially hoped to bring price growth back down to the 2% target.
• Fed Governor Adriana Kugler noted that economic conditions are moving in the right direction, and it is likely appropriate to begin easing policy sometime later this year if the economy evolves as expected.
• Dallas Fed President Lorie Logan reiterated that although tremendous progress has been made, inflation remains too high and will need to see 'several more months' to have confidence that it is heading to 2%.
• St. Louis Fed President Alberto Musalem noted that the labor market remains particularly tight and that it could take entire months or quarters before policies drag inflation back to the target levels.
• The US Dollar bulls remain on the defensive in the wake of the overnight decline in the US Treasury bond yields, lending some support to the non-yielding yellow metal amid absent relevant economic data