Hydra in Greek mythology is a many-headed water serpent. To kill it was one of the 12 tasks Herakles had to complete. He had quite a job to do, since when one of its 9 heads were chopped off, two would grow in its place. In addition, one of its heads was immortal to make the job even more difficult. Today, debt is like a Hydra. Debt raises its head to be a threat in many places and at the centre t...Read More
Mar 06, 2018 Guest(s): Colin Hamilton Commodities Research, BMO Capital Markets Investors have placed more interest in the industrial, rather than precious metals, and Colin Hamilton, Managing Director of Commodities Research at BMO Capital Markets, said that there is good reason for this."The industrial metals are doing really, really well. We've got China, three years of outperformance now. Ex...Read More
LONDON, 4 March 2018 - BullionVault is featured today in UK weekend newspaper The Mail on Sunday's finance pages as part of a share tip on Augmentum, the fintech investment fund now floating on the London stock market.Besides peer-to-peer lender Zopa and crowd-funding site Seedrs, "Augmentum has four further investments, including Interactive Investor, the UK's second largest online stockbroker......Read More
Adam HamiltonArchivesMar 02, 2018 The US dollar has fallen rather sharply over the past year or so, despite ongoing Fed rate hikes. This persistent dollar weakness has really boosted gold. There's a fascinating interplay between these two currencies and futures speculators' expectations for Fed rate hikes. These traders hang on every word from top Fed officials, which greatly influences their trad...Read More
Here Are 3 Hot Things to Know About Stocks Right Now For the week the S&P lost 2.04%, the Dow tanked 3.05% and the Nasdaq declined 1.08%.At one point during Friday's session, the Dow was down 391 points.The Dow remains 2,078 points below its all-time high on Jan. 26. Wall Street Overview Stocks turned mixed on Friday, March 2, as investors reacted to President Donald Trump's...Read More
S&P 500 shrugs off early losses, small cap shares lead rallyGold and silver rally, industrials lead European shares lowerPlurimi CIO Favors Cyclical Stocks Despite Tariffs ThreatU.S. stocks ended a volatile session higher, paring a weekly decline, as investors speculated that President Donald Trump’s tough tariff talk won’t translate into the most severe protectionist policies. Treas...Read More
Trump Says 'Trade Wars Are Good, and Easy to Win'President Donald Trump is touting the virtues of a trade war. In the $5.1 trillion-a-day currency market, the yen has emerged as a clear winner from the escalating rhetoric.The latest move pushes forward the administration’s trade agenda, after it took similar actions on other goods this year and jawboned the dollar lower. The potential...Read More
U.S. stock futures extended declines Friday after President Donald Trump said that trade wars were "easy to win", suggesting his plan to impose stiff import tariffs on steel could ignite harsher reaction from around the world. U.S. equity futures, which had attempted to stabilize in European early trading following yesterday's sharp declines that loped more than 400 points from the Dow Jones Ind...Read More
Bank of England Governor Mark Carney said cryptocurrencies were "failing" and urged a global crackdown on the $450 market in order to align them with the broader financial system. Carney, a long-time critic of digital currencies, addressed the question of their ability to replace traditional money during a speech in Edinburgh, Scotland, arguing they were proving to be a poor way to store value a...Read More
A popular thesis since the 1930s is that a natural progression exists from currency wars to trade wars to shooting wars. Both history and analysis support this thesis.Currency wars do not exist all the time; they arise under certain conditions and persist until there is either systemic reform or systemic collapse. The conditions that give rise to currency wars are too much debt and too little grow...Read More
"Trump Proposes Tax Hike for Millions of Americans. Markets Plunge."Did you catch this headline this morning?You did not, of course.We spun it from the whole cloth.But it may as well be authentic.Details to follow.First the news...The Trump administration proposed a weighty 25% tariff on steel imports yesterday.Aluminum imports must pay a 10% entry fee.The tariff could potentially apply to all nat...Read More
That's not necessarily a bad thing.While we've seen a few big declines across indexes, they've almost all been immediately offset by big rallies the next day.The five-day chart for the North American pot index highlights this perfectly.There's volatility, but it's not favoring one direction over another.That flux is being mirrored in Washington, where the National Governors Association descended t...Read More
Today we're going to look at an under-utilized, but hugely advantageous dollar-stretching opportunity - buying used instead of new.When you buy a new car, it loses 10% of its value the first mile you drive it off the lot. A year later, it's gone down 20%."New" has a value, so the first step to successfully buying used is to subtract the "cost of new."3 Rules for Buying UsedRule #1: Start in a rang...Read More
The swamp is leaking into the stock market this week.President Trump announced that the US would begin to implement steel and aluminum tariffs as soon as early as next week. The surprise announcement came as a shock to the markets with the major averages trickling lower on the news. By the end of the day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had shed 420 points, or 1.7%.The fake news is now hyping up...Read More
Precious metals and the SPDR Gold Trust security came under pressure this week alongside U.S. equities, failing as a hedge against such risk.The catalyst was fear of the Fed and a steeper monetary policy tightening trajectory, which work against both risk assets and gold today.The outlook for the GLD security will depend on the development of multiple factors, but I have a base expectation and a l...Read More
Latin AmericaGuatemala Mines a Mother Lode of TroubleA bitter fight over a silver mine points to the pitfalls of Latin America's new resource nationalism.by Mac Margolis@macmargolisMore stories by Mac MargolisRead More
Jim Willie is a statistical analyst in marketing research and retail forecasting. He holds a PhD in Statistics, and his career has stretched over 25 years. He aspires to thrive in the financial editor world, unencumbered by the limitations of economic credentials. Jim operates a free website called Golden Jackass.Read More
Whilethere is disagreement over its causes – man-made versus natural – the realityof climate change is an incontrovertible fact. The planet is warming, affectingour weather, our oceans, our growing seasons, even our food, as crops fail,causing shortages and price hikes. Storms are becoming more frequent, and moreintense, and droughts are lasting longer.Forestfires are an annual occurre...Read More
Mike Gleason: It is my privilege now to welcome back Michael Pento, president and founder of Pento Portfolio Strategies, and author of the book The Coming Bond Market Collapse: How to Survive the Demise of the U.S. Debt Market.Michael is a well-known money manager and a fantastic market commentator, and over the past few years has been a wonderful guest and one of our favorite interviews here on t...Read More
Normally the action in the gold and silver futures markets tends to be pretty similar, since the same general forces affect both precious metals. When inflationContinue...Read More