Watching the markets tank yesterday, supposedly because of a pessimistic World Bank (!) report, got me to thinking about Elliott Wave analyst Robert Prechter’s belief that news doesn’t move markets. Instead, he says, it is our reaction to the news th ...
Facts have a different feel when they’re personal. And speaking personally, anecdotal evidence that Americans are seriously spooked is starting to pile up. In the past few months:
I was getting ready to post an update on GoldMoney’s new service that allows customers to take delivery of their gold and silver in smaller, more practical bars. But Run To Gold’s Trace Mayer got there first, with an article that also does a nice job ...
Discover Magazine runs a monthly back-page feature called "20 Things You Didn't Know About..." that usually lives up to its title. A while back the subject was money, and some of the factoids were worth noting. See 6, 7, and 8.
Gold is making another run at $1,000, silver is up even more in percentage terms, and the financial markets are showering the established miners with cash: In February Newmont raised $1.7 billion, while Yamana, Agnico-Eagle
Last week the Wall Street Journal published an article that (assuming it wasn’t a clever satire) perfectly illustrates the train wreck that's in store for clients of mainstream money managers (and apparently also for Journal subscribers).
People believe they have little to lose, they’re eager to hang those they believe responsible for their problems, and they’ll listen to radical or violent proposals. We’re now just entering what will likely be the worst economic trough since the Indu ...
EVERYTHING is mispriced for what is unfolding. Stocks, Bonds, currencies, natural resources, precious metals, real estate are ALL set for massive VOLATILITY and “volatility is opportunity” for the prepared investor. Markets are going to ZOOM
The other day at lunch with a friend, we began talking about my Fear Index. He suggested that I give it a new name in order to more accurately convey the important message it offers. Namely, it numerically measures the soundness of the dollar. Others ...
After its worst year living memory, the stock market is due for a bit of relief. Whether it turns out to be a dead cat bounce or cyclical bottom remains to be seen. But some heavyweight bears are now placing their bets on the long side. Among them:
Only two things can save the Fed at this point. One is a bailout by the federal government. This recapitalization could be financed by taxes or by monetizing government debt in another blow to the value of the currency.
The other possibility is conc ...
Here, I'll simplify it: your government, through Legal Tender laws, is forcing you to use dollars to navigate the economy in which you reside. It is then printing this currency with reckless abandon. Finally, the same government is issuing more debt ...
Americans hoping to protect their wealth from a soon to be bankrupt and panicked government are finding that their options are few, and growing fewer by the day. The following article is reproduced in its entirety and without comment, because it spea ...
'No Inflation, Constant Expansion' was a misnomer to start with, the lie of the first half undone by the scam of the second. Plenty more academics (most of them policy-wonks, too) also stepped up to put a name on that era, variously calling it &quo ...
From the December 22, 2008 edition of James Turk’s Freemarket Gold & Money Report: This letter is the last one for this year, so it’s time to look ahead to 2009. It’s shaping up to be an ugly
Henry Kissinger used to say that the tricky thing about foreign policy was that when you have the most options you generally have the least information, and vice versa. As information accumulates, options dwindle, until you’re left with absolute clar ...
At the end of the de-leveraging, you will see a divergence between gold and silver on the one hand and industrial commodities on the other. Even today we have this very strong demand for physical gold and silver globally, from India to the Middle Eas ...
Today the news is unrelentingly bad. Layoffs are soaring, stocks are way down, home building is plunging. Deflation is here, with all that that implies. Here are the headlines for my top four news feeds as of 1:00 PM Pacific Time on Wednesday the 19th:
Maybe one in a million of the world’s citizens realizes that there is much more gold in existence than there is silver. If sufficient numbers of people knew this fact, gold would not be 75 times the price of silver. In fact, gold might be a lot less ...
It’s been fun over the past few years watching EuroPacfic Capital’s Peter Schiff educate mainstream (i.e. clueless) economists and money managers on CNBC and elsewhere. My personal favorite is this one
Back in mid-2007 I posted a column titled “Death Spiral” that made some (what seemed at the time) extreme predictions. Here are the last few paragraphs:
The greatest transfer of wealth from those that store their wealth in paper to those that don't is unfolding. ALL Markets will have to price in reality, and the reality is that the G7 in general and the financial and banking industries in particular ...
If the Fed can’t save us, maybe Warren Buffett can. That seems to be what U.S. markets are hoping in after-hours trading, as they rally on the announcement that Goldman Sachs has attracted $5 billion from Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. The deal comes ...
Here we go. The U.S. government’s options have finally dwindled to just two: Accept a 1930s-style deflationary crash or embark on a Weimar Republic-style hyperinflation. Not that there was ever any doubt, but today they made it official. Treasury
There was a thought-provoking book published last year entitled The Black Swan. It provides an insightful perspective into seemingly improbable events (i.e., a ‘black swan’) and our thinking that surrounds them. The author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb co ...
Everyone can look at the data and form their own conclusions. But when silver is in short physical supply, commanding injuriously high premiums and difficult to locate; when investors are piling into the silver ETF in droves, a 40% silver price plun ...
When you write magazine articles for a living, as I mostly do, you spend a lot of time tracking down and pestering experts in various fields. And you soon discover that the expert population distributes along the familiar bell shaped curve, with a fe ...
So far we’ve tossed around terms like “money” and “currency” with some abandon. If this left you a little unclear about their exact meaning, not to worry, you’re in good company; the world’s business and political leaders appear to be just as confuse ...
The phrase ‘systemic collapse’ is rarely used in financial circles, but with housing collateral values in continued decline, there is an enormous financial margin call rippling through the system. In the OTC derivative market, values are unable to be ...
I just handed in a manuscript for a new book which contains the following sentence:
“The image of McMansion ghost towns, once the wishful thinking of a tiny anticapitalist fringe, is suddenly a little too close for comfort.” I’ve been worrying ...
I lived in South East Asia for most of the 1970’s, working in the branch offices there for one of the large New York City banks. I was a ‘line’ officer. This meant that I was not in the back-office, but instead, I dealt with the bank’s customers, whi ...
For gold bugs, the past few years have been kind of peaceful, intellectually speaking. Because they understood the dynamic of fiat currency leading to excessive borrowing leading to financial crisis they were neither confused about what was happening ...
There are three kinds of precious metals investors, and only two of them are happy. Those who own mostly bullion (or its ETF or digital currency analogues) have by definition profited dollar-for-dollar as gold and silver have soared recently.
Because a subscription to the Wall Street Journal cost several hundred dollars a year, most people out there don’t get it and DollarCollapse.com rarely posts links to its articles. But every once in a while the Journal puts out an edition that captur ...
In yet another sign that the end is near, Harper’s Magazine, that venerable fount of left wing culture, has become a source of clear-eyed financial journalism. In February it ran a cover story by iTuilip’s Eric Janszen explaining America’s devolution ...
My new friend Shayne McGuire is director of global research at Texas’ $115 billion Teacher Retirement System, which means he oversees a vast portfolio of high-grade bonds, Blue Chip stocks, and cash. Not the kind of environment that’s usually hospita ...
Back in June of 2006 I posted some long excerpts from an internal report produced by Colorado & Santa Fe Real Estate, a Denver firm owned by an entrepreneur Marcel Arsenault. More about him here. After riding the long bull market in U.S. real estate ...
During the past year the thoughts of some perceptive people appeared in this column. But just how perceptive is only apparent in retrospect. Some of these guys absolutely nailed it. So for the holidays I've decided to repost a few of the columns tha ...
Here we go. Gold and silver are soaring, financial stocks are tanking, heads are rolling on Wall Street, and the Fed’s creditability is melting like a popsicle on a hot summer sidewalk.
Here’s one for the ‘don’t try this at home,’ file. Yesterday’s post on how the dollar’s decline makes China’s red-hot stock market look like a classic short candidate—and my decision to buy puts on a China ETF—brought the following response from
Yesterday I took part in a round table discussion with some seriously smart, articulate money managers, two of whom are putting their clients into foreign stocks. Well-run companies with nice dividends in fiscally-sound countries will outperform, the ...
One of the most popular themes of the sound-money media is “the crossroad,” that place where a country ends up when it borrows too much for two long and is forced to choose between two (and only two) very different paths. One leads to deflation, with ...
Prudent Bear’s Doug Noland has for years been pointing out that one of the drivers of the credit bubble has been the ever-broadening definition of money. As the global economy expanded without a hic-up, more and more instruments came to be used as a ...
Most financial bubbles are pretty easy to spot: An asset class climbs way beyond what old-fashioned valuation measures used to define as reasonable, market participants start acting like idiots, and pundits rationalize the madness with learned “new e ...
A world run on two or three fiat currencies, issued and accepted by diktat...becomes only more likely every time that drug-lords in Moscow trade a kilo of crank. But as a store of wealth for the future, however, gold keeps winning out. Since the drea ...
Everything is in bubble territory. Everything. From Indian antiquities to modern Chinese art; from land in Panama to Mayfair; from forestry, infrastructure and the junkiest bonds to mundane blue chips; it's bubble time! The bursting of this bubble w ...
The introduction of gold and silver ETFs has, so far, been a huge positive for the precious metals markets, opening the field to individuals and insitituions who wouldn't otherwise be buying bullion. It's safe to say that the vast majority of us (i ...
In short, the global boom in all asset prices has come thanks to one major bear market – the bear market in money. Government-led and central bank-sanctioned, it has now halved the value of US Dollars versus gold. It's pushed Sterling
All you worried goldbugs out there, repeat after me: Corrections happen. Every bull market has lots of 5%-10% squiggles that look like the end of the world to those who don’t understand, and like entry points to those who do. GoldMoney’s James Turk d ...
I had another installment of “Banks and Bubbles” all set to go today. This one was going to have a little fun with the rumor that Bank of America is negotiating to buy Countrywide Credit, and repeat the by-now-tired observation that at the peak of th ...
Today's bubble in novelty and complexity is sure to blow up – if not in 2007, then all in good time. You might like to hold gold as insurance. For the "barbarous relic" – so beloved of apparently naive investors in the booming economies of ...
Professor Piggington, a.k.a. my good friend Rich Toscano, recently teamed up with a San Diego money management shop called Pacific Capital Associates. Their new website features a well-reasoned explanation of why “cash” is no longer a risk-free inve ...
A man can make a fool of himself whenever he wants. Generally, he pays the price himself and the rest of the world goes on with its business. But in order to get a real public spectacle going you need to separate cause from effect. Because it is only ...
It’s easy to talk about a credit bubble, but a picture is still worth a thousand words—or in this case millions of dollars. Below are some charts created by Houston-based Bearing Asset Management that illustrate just how crazy (and familiar) today’s ...
You have to feel for the world’s central bankers. On Friday the dollar caps a down week with a near-vertical fall that stops only when the markets close. So while the rest of us are watching TV and blissfully pigging out, our economic policy makers h ...
In previous episodes of “Banks and Bubbles” we witnessed Bank of America buying a huge credit card company at the peak of the consumer credit cycle and Wachovia plunging into California mortgage lending just as the state enters a housing depression.
According to the great analyst Charles Kindleberger, financial crises are associated with changed expectations that lead owners of wealth to try to shift quickly out of one type of asset and into another, with resulting falls in prices of the first t ...
David Morgan, publisher of the SilverInvestor newsletter, www.silver-investor.com is out with a new book that everyone interested in silver should read. Part of the “Get the Skinny on…” series, it’s a concise statement of the case for silver going to ...
One of the arguments against the existance of a nationwide housing bubble is the notion that “real estate is local.” That is, houses aren’t pork bellies that trade on centralized exchanges. They exist in hundreds different markets, each with its own ...
I guess that’s it then. BusinessWeek and JP Morgan have called the bottom in the housing market, so we can all start snapping up mcmansions at, what, 3% below peak prices. Such a deal.
Poor Mr. Typical has not had a wage increase since 1972, according to the U.S. Department of Labor's website. He earned the equivalent of $334.60 a week back 24 years ago. Now, the figure is just $277.96. But he didn't cut back spending just becaus ...
Pretty much the whole sound-money community agrees that hard times are coming. But exactly how we get from today’s illusion of prosperity to tomorrow’s financial Armageddon—now that’s a tougher call. Will the global economy collapse under a mountain ...
Great gold price spikes such as the one encountered in 1979-1980 were unusual events, but punctuated mankind's existence. Throughout history, when a country debased its money for an extended period, its citizens eventually recognized the reduction i ...
The other day Bloomberg ran an article on how all those doomsayers predicting a repeat of the 1970s are delusional. It’s a long piece, but this paragraph pretty much sums it up:
The world is full of people with little or no real estate experience (okay, like me) who still claim to know the business well enough to predict a crash. It’s also full of real estate industry pros who, deep in denial, seem to expect a soft landing f ...
While precious metals were getting whacked again today and arguments were raging about whether this is a healthy correction or the end of the run (see the mainstream’s take in Financial Times), the Wall Street Journal gave silver investors a reason t ...
In order to fully understand what is really happening on the central bank front, Larry Summers is worth listening to, now that he is free of all the politics at Harvard. Mr. Summers who served in a series of senior policy positions – most notably as ...
Back in January I posted a short piece on how banks tend to pile into whatever is hot just as it’s about to implode. Bank of America’s acquisition of credit card giant MBNA at a time when consumer debt was setting records was, I predicted, the dea ...
Gold bullion is not going to be a feasible alternative to the U.S. dollar because there is not enough of it to make a market. It will all just become "not for sale."
There’s a remarkable exchange in this morning’s Yahoo! message board for KBH, the big homebuilder, some of which appears below. It needs little explanation, other than to say that REO stands for “real estate owned,” a measure of what banks have repos ...
"If someone had asked me to devise a method, or scheme, that could propel silver prices sharply higher, I don’t think I could have dreamed up anything more potentially bullish than the Barclays ETF. At the heart of the silver story is the struct ...
M3 died a controversial death this week. Whether the Fed’s decision to stop reporting its broadest measure of money is a simple recognition that money has become too complex to quantify, or an attempt to hide the accelerating debasement of the dollar ...
Funny how rituals persist long after their original point is forgotten. Take the federal debt limit, that relic of a time when lawmakers were actually embarrassed about piling debt onto our kids. Nothing embarrasses these guys any more, of course, an ...
The most exciting thing about the U.S. financial markets is their lack of excitement. Let me explain. For more than two years, the major stock indexes have meandered in a tight trading range, exiting 2005 just a few percentage points above where they ...
“Since printing paper money is nothing short of counterfeiting, the issuer of the international currency must always be the country with the military might to guarantee control over the system. This magnificent scheme seems the perfect system for obt ...
Housing stocks got a nice pop this week, as both Barron’s and the Wall Street Journal called luxury homebuilder Toll Brothers a buy. Interesting timing, this. Why would such usually-sensible folks talk up a cyclical industry at that peak of its cycle ...
Millions of people around the world have a problem. They see America headed for a financial train wreck of historic proportions, but they don’t know how to profit from it. If you're one of them, you've come to the right place, because I just
Every great turning point has its Irving Fisher. He was the Yale economist who in October of 1929 said that stocks were at a "permanently high plateau." Later that same month, the market crashed, the Depression started, and Fisher became an ...
It’s all about the Fed these days. Pick up the Wall Street Journal or turn on CNBC and likely as not you’ll find a pundit droning on about whether Bernanke will have as steady a hand as Greenspan or whether inflation targeting will ...
Ah, the cycle of life. One generation of bankers retires and another comes along to make the same bonehead mistakes. The new guys start out with the best of intentions, of course, and for a while they keep to the straight and narrow. But the...
