It’s said that if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. If the Fed’s words amounted to anything, they would force the yield curve not to invert. They are as keenly aware as anyone else that the past nine times the 2-year rate has risen above the 10-year rate, it has accurately predicted a recession. And in their perfect world, soothsaying would bend the market (and the yield curve)... read more

As China continues to stockpile gold in its governmental reserve accounts, they add credibility to their efforts to sway the world’s de facto trade currency status from the US dollar to the yuan. Having already successfully launched the petro-yuan, allowing them to trade oil futures in the native currency, branching out to the LME would be an affirmative step on the global trade stage in n... read more

You can add to the below list so many other factors: extreme overvaluation, corporate zombie debt, the inevitable failure of the dollar, the tapped-out consumer. But beyond that, it’s important to remember to see the forest for the trees. Calling the specific detonator of the next market crash, or its timing, is not the important part. Knowing that it will happen, and positioning your port... read more

Here’s another example of how the Everything Bubble, the persistent inflation of all risk assets, has simply been the result of Fed money printing. Here is the non-recovery. While banks use endless fiat loans to drive stock prices higher, a greater proportion of middle-class Americans find themselves unable to afford what most consider to be an entry-level middle-class lifestyle. At a t... read more

Gold’s primacy as an investment is not contingent upon which way the wind blows, which way the rates go, or anything else so transient. The dollar, following in the footsteps of all fiat currencies ever, will fail. The greatest wealth rotation ever will be out of currency and into money: Out of intrinsically worthless, backed-by-nothing, fancy-ink-on-fancy-paper US dollars and into true st... read more

We have reached a point where there is near-unanimous agreement that our current rate of government debt spending is unsustainable. But what does that actually mean? When debt ceilings come and go and even the temporary shutdown of the government becomes a semi-regular occurrence that doesn’t seem to impact anything, who can be blamed for seeing our financial quandary as one for which the... read more

So much of what we lose when we use credit or debit cards takes place behind the scenes. We don't actively see the algorithms being run to predict our future behavior. We don't have a seat at the table as marketers pore over the reams of personal data we so willingly turned over to them, for free, to enable them to better separate us from our wealth. Your cash card leaves a wide data trai... read more

Truly, what has the point been of the unprecedented market manipulation undertaken by the Fed for the past decade? To magically rig a world in which cyclical recessions do not occur, to enable failing business that destroy capital that could be allocated productively? To simply forestall inevitable pain, propping up zombie companies that cannot survive without ZIRP, but will immediately go u... read more

Barring major new and unforeseen discoveries, we are heading into a long-term gold supply shortage. Increased exploration spending has not resulted in additional supply, and gold’s longer-term sideways price trading is likely to exploration spending fatigue, exacerbating the imbalance. The demand for gold is increasing, yet new discoveries of the precious metal have not kept pace with t... read more

-- Some big investors see warning signs ahead for markets but are holding their positions. Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris is taking action: He’s put half of his $5.7 billion net worth into gold. He said in an interview Monday that he believes gold prices will rally further, reaching $1,800 per ounce from just above $1,300 now, while “overvalued” stock markets crash. “In the... read more