The $64 Trillion Question What do rational savers and investors do in an environment of zero percent interest rates, where the daily headlines speculate how long major currencies (like the U.S. dollar) will hold their value as national debts mount? Switch (at least) a little of their holdings to gold. Even if that amount is...Read More
Do I hear $10,000 an ounce??There seems to be a “can you top that?” competition going on at the moment regarding gold prices. As gold has inexorably risen to about $1,200 an ounce today — up 15% just in the last month, and four-fold since 2000 — analysts have scrambled to raise their projected price...Read More
FIFO, LIFO & LILO “Where is the money [created by the U.S.] going? Where the problem’s going to be: Asia. You can see asset prices going up, not only in Korea, in Taiwan, in Singapore and in Hong Kong, going up to levels that are incompatible or inconsistent with the economic fundamentals.” –Donald Tsang, Hong...Read More
The Fed, Commodity Prices & Economic Recovery Twelve hundred miles (give or take) from Wall Street, me thinks that a not-so virtuous cycle has emerged regarding the government’s various and sundry efforts to nurse the economy back to health. The dynamic goes something like this: Step 1: the Federal Reserve and Treasury essentially borrow and/or...Read More
A *Macroeconomic Overview Back in April, I ran a post called “Real Estate & Inflation” that isolated wage growth as the key to whether any inflationary outbreak would help or hurt real estate (incidentally, that post is now ranked 18th in the world, according to Google). Specifically, if inflation spilled over into workers’ wages, it...Read More
That’s the Bearish Case?? Though gold performs well as a defensive asset in times of global economic strife, its long-term record is spotty. Over $1,040 an ounce is only a record if you leave inflation out of the picture. Factor that in and gold prices haven’t gotten near prices from the early 1980s. –Melinda Peer,...Read More
