Gold has big year in 2020 and outlook for this year robust. Learn about monetary expansion and gold future prices.Read More

The gold futures price reached US$1,767/ounce this week before retreating, which was the second time it has surpassed US$1,760 in the past two months, marking some of gold's highest levels in several years.Read More

Why we can now be sure that interest rates won't go up this year … The Government clearly would like to keep interest rates low as possible for as long as possible, even though many of its supporters are net savers who are losing out … Interest rates are not going to be hiked in 2015. That is a forecast, rather than a certainty, of course, but virtually every piece of recent data s...Read More

Why the Fed Won't Tank the Stock Market … Investors in the U.S. seem fixated on a gloomy outlook for 2015, in which the Federal Reserve's efforts to remove economic stimulus cause stock and bond prices to fall. They're missing an important detail: If the Fed raises short-term interest rates above those in other major economies, U.S. markets may actually benefit. – Bloomberg...Read More

GW Pharmaceuticals (GWPH) Falls as Cannabis Drug Fails Key Cancer Pain Study … GW Pharmaceuticals (GWPH), a British biopharmaceutical company dedicated to developing therapeutics derived from marijuana, released news today pertaining to its first Phase III trial for cancer pain drug Sativex. The product was used as an adjunctive treatment to optimized chronic opioid therapy during experiment...Read More

Germany's Angela Merkel needs a dressing down, not the red carpet treatment… Angela Merkel, who visits Britain this week, is a huge success in Germany, but in Europe she is a destructive failure who is damaging her own country as much as others … – UK TelegraphDominant Social Theme: Angela Merkel is a leader who can deliver.Free-Market Analysis: This article is a good example...Read More

The Atlantic Suburbs and the New American Poverty … More people with low incomes now live outside of cities, and some areas are ill-equipped to deal with the influx of the poor … Between 2000 and 2011, Atlanta's suburban poor population grew by 159 percent. But the suburbs of Atlanta no longer hold just the promise of good schools, clean streets, and whitewashed homes with manicure...Read More

A grand Tory-Labour coalition might be good for British business … A Conservative-Labour government is unlikely. But, were it to happen, the worst excesses of the two main parties might cancel each other out … – UK TelegraphDominant Social Theme: What we need mostly is wise leaders, not party politics.Free-Market Analysis: The technocracy meme constantly reemerges. In this case w...Read More

When is insider trading against the law? It's a trick question: There is no actual law against insider trading. This became painfully clear last month when a federal appeals court tossed out the criminal convictions of two Wall Street hedge-fund managers who had been found guilty of the offense about two years ago. The court not only exonerated the traders, but also called into question the en...Read More

It Was a Pivotal Year in TPP Activism but the Biggest Fight Is Still to Come … A draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership's (TPP) Intellectual Property chapter from May 2014 leaked this past fall, confirming what previous leaks had suggested: this so-called trade agreement would bring copyright enforcement provisions that threaten users' right to free expression, privacy, and unfettere...Read More

World faces low inflation threat not seen since before WWII … Analysts are predicting that inflation will fall below 2pc in all of the countries that make up the G7 group of advanced nations this year. Central banks need to work fast to stop the world falling into a deflationary spiral … If inflation falls as low across the G7 as economists expect it to, this year will bring one of the...Read More

How can we make capitalism more popular? Individual investors should have access to tech start-up IPOs, giving the public a stake in capitalism, says Xavier Rolet, the chief executive of the London Stock Exchange … Capitalism has taken a pummeling over the last few years. From the global credit crunch to the banking failures, the mis-selling of payment protection insurance (PPI) and beyond,...Read More

The Rise and Fall of Gold … King Midas lusted after it. The Incas worshipped it. Shiny flakes of it set off a 19th-century rush to California and ship captains never stop looking for it at the bottom of the sea. While gold has ignited passions for centuries, for today's investors, it seems, the metal has been losing its allure. After surging sevenfold during a 12-year bull market —...Read More

So high expectations, so few riders … Criticizing economics for not being scientific enough is a crime of which many of us – I've done it – are guilty. But there's a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. Alex Rosenberg and Tyler Curtain, writing in the New York Times, have done it the wrong way. – BloombergDominant Social Theme: Economics is a great tool for...Read More

Greek expulsion from the euro would demolish EMU's contagion firewall … Should EMU leaders choose to cut off liquidity support for the Greek banking system they might find that their contagion defences are a fiction. – UK TelegraphDominant Social Theme: Greece is now irrelevant to the financial health of the euro and the EU. EU defenses, as painfully placed as the Maginot Line, wil...Read More

Our Predictions … Gold and Silver Markets – 2015 Astrological Trends … Gold and Silver markets are relatively stable, owing to which both these metals are seen as good investments. Ganesha takes the advent of 2015 as an opportunity to look at the 2015 Horoscope and planets to predict the way ahead for these markets … Gold and Silver markets are relatively stable, owing to w...Read More

There Is a Constitutional Crisis, but Not the One Many People Think … It's the Bush-Obama record of surveillance and lack of accountability—and not executive action on immigration—that ought to concern citizens. – The AtlanticDominant Social Theme: Lawlessness is the problem, not specific laws or regulations.Free-Market Analysis: The idea of this Atlantic article is tha...Read More

Op-Ed America needs to study the enemy within … U.S. politicians are unwilling to compromise, and restraints on voting rights are eroding democracy … The only real threat to American democracy comes from Americans themselves. – LA TimesDominant Social Theme: Libertarians may precipitate a US fascist dictatorship.Free-Market Analysis: This article presents the idea that people are...Read More

Will the Real Angela Merkel Please Stand Up? … If anything is certain about the new year, it is that much of the world's stability and economic health will depend on what is done, or not done, in Europe. And what happens in Europe will depend, in large part, on German Chancellor Angela Merkel. – BloombergDominant Social Theme: What's going on with Angela Merkel? She changes her...Read More

The Year of Piketty … Last month the Financial Times chose Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the TwentyFirst Century," a study of the underlying dynamics of inequality, as its Business Book of the Year. The honor rather understates the book's impact. Forget "business book." "Capital" was the nonfiction publishing sensation of the year, and maybe of the decade...Read More

New Aerial Photos Suggest Big Organic Farmers May Be Lying to Us … Consumers of organic eggs and milk like knowing that the cows and chickens on organic farms are treated decently. Many people count on the fact that these animals are required to get a certain amount of time in the great outdoors. They're not supposed to be kept indoors round the clock in classic factory farm fashion. Unf...Read More

Fed at Odds With BIS on Supervisory Approach … Federal Reserve officials have been clear they would like to use regulatory policy as a first line of defense when dealing with excess risk-taking in financial markets, with interest rates to be employed only in extreme cases when other tools have been exhausted – WSJDominant Social Theme: Either raise rates or regulate borrowing – b...Read More