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

BIS and IMF attacks on quantitative easing deeply misguided warn monetarists … Monetarists across the world have warned that the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements are making an historic error by calling for a withdrawal of emergency stimulus before the global economy has fully recovered. The BIS warned against "ever more monetary policy activism"...Read More

George Soros switches from physical gold to gold stocks and that is very bullish for gold prices … Ever the investor who loves to confuse markets – remember how his description of gold as the 'ultimate bubble' confused some folk as he bought the metal himself – George Soros has done it again with his gold ETF sales. Today the global financial press is awash with reports t...Read More

China to the rescue of Argentina with a 10 billion dollars equivalent swap … Argentina is negotiating with China a new 10 billon dollars equivalent swap of international reserves support based on the experience of 2009 when the global financial crisis. The new accord should theoretically help Argentina strengthen its international position vis-à-vis the run on the dollar (or the fligh...Read More

Euro – Quo Vadis? How much more punishment will Europeans take to defend the misconceived Euro currency? … The Eurozone is in crisis, and only bold reforms can tackle the root causes. In the following article, Wolfgang Kasper explains why we should be tuning the clock back to before the Maasstricht Treaty, and proposes that an understanding of institutional economics is crucial in orde...Read More

Creative destruction: our economic crisis was wholly predictable: Keynes, Hobson, Marx – and the crisis of capitalism. Is it to the wrong ideas of economists or to the interests of the power-holders that we should turn to explain the "Great Contraction" of 2008-2009? John Maynard Keynes believed that the Great Depression of 1929-32 was caused by the wrong theory of how the economy...Read More

Reuters: 'An Increasingly Polarized Washington Is Devouring Its Own' … Unprecedented Justice Department searches of journalists' phone records. IRS targeting of conservative political groups. Spiraling sexual assault rates in the military. And the downplaying of the first killing of an American ambassador in 30 years. But Obama's failings are only part of the problem. An incr...Read More

Beijing has long maintained control in part by tacitly promising that over time everyone will benefit from the country's new wealth. Rampant corruption and the garish displays of affluence by senior officials and their families strike at the heart of Beijing's promise that it is working to make life better for all. Ordinary Chinese, often through microblogs and other social media, have inc...Read More

Two-speed Britain as London soars away from the rest … In London, there are more cranes on the skyline than in the rest of the country put together. Evidence is growing that a recovery is under way, but there are now fears that only the south-east is benefiting, leaving the nation more divided. – The GuardianDominant Social Theme: This is an unpredictable element of the recovery.Free-M...Read More

Gen X Has New Reason to Resent Boomers as Retirement Looks Bleak … Generation X, the unlucky cohort of Americans who became young adults during the boom years of the 1990s only to suffer a midlife bust, is facing bleak retirement prospects, according to a study. The Pew Charitable Trusts said the typical Gen X couple, born between 1966 and 1975, only has enough savings to replace half of its...Read More

House lawmakers reach tentative deal to revamp immigration … Prospects for passage of a major immigration bill improved on Thursday when a bipartisan group of lawmakers in the House of Representatives declared they had reached a tentative deal, resolving disputes that had threatened to torpedo negotiations. The breakthrough came at the end of a two-hour private meeting of seven Republican an...Read More

Credit Suisse: 'Gold Is Going To Get Crushed' … Bearish sentiment toward gold has prices for the yellow metal tumbling again. On Wednesday, George Soros revealed through a regulatory filing that he cut his gold exposure during the first quarter. In a new note to clients, Credit Suisse's Ric Deverall forecasted that gold would plunge to $1,100 this year and eventually to $1,000 wi...Read More

LONG before Baobab became a lowly journalist he scraped a living as a lowly academic. "If you're so clever why aren't you rich?" was a favourite tease of his less bookish but better-paid peers. The Africa Progress Report, prepared by an expert panel led by Kofi Annan, a former UN secretary-general, was unveiled last week at the World Economic Forum conference in Cape Town, and de...Read More

According to the economic history books, the one great conference that resolved [global economic] tension – for a quarter century – was "Bretton Woods," a convocation of 44 countries in the White Mountains of New Hampshire less than a month after D-Day and the beginning of the end for the axis powers in World War II. What would the post-war world economy look like? That was t...Read More

'Dreaded' Unwinding Easier Said Than Done … It ought to be the clearest sign yet that the crisis is over. The Wall Street Journal's Fed-Watcher-In-Chief Jon Hilsenrath has told us that the U.S. central bank has 'mapped out' a way to dial back its mighty $85 billion- a-month bond-buying program. We don't yet know precisely how and we don't conference in Chicago, Fr...Read More

If The Economy Will Collapse When The Fed Stops Printing Money Then Lets Keep Printing … Gawker's Hamilton Nolan concludes a discussion of the European Depression with his best Zero Hedge imitation: It's only a matter of time before the Fed stops pumping money into our economy and we deflate along with everyone else and then the demographic retirement bomb hits and we have fewer youn...Read More

Franken aims at reform of credit-rating system … What is Democratic Sen. Al Franken's big idea to clean up the credit rating system? Transparency. Franken, a junior senator from Minnesota, criticizes the Securities and Exchange Commission's inaction on a 2010 amendment he sponsored that would have eliminated conflicts of interest in the credit-rating business model. "Our financi...Read More

The IRS Was Dead Right To Scrutinize Tea Party … Lost in the latest political scandal is a simple fact: The Internal Revenue Service was acting in the public interest when it opted to train its auditing power on the Tea Party and affiliated groups. In castigating government as the root of all evil while portraying taxation as a form of tyranny, the Tea Party is no less than a mass celebratio...Read More

Mises' Answer to Would-Be Conspirators: You Will Lose … Over half a century ago, Ludwig von Mises made a crucial observation. The capitalistic social order, therefore, is an economic democracy in the strictest sense of the word. In the last analysis, all decisions are dependent on the will of the people as consumers. Thus, whenever there is a conflict between the consumers' views and...Read More

Hayek has become the patron saint of conservative intellectuals – and with good reason. He went head to head with John Maynard Keynes in 1931 in an effort to stop Keynesianism in its tracks. Hayek failed, but his attempt gave him mythical status among thinkers who deplore big government and central management of the economy. Hayek became a conservative hero a second time with publication of...Read More

Cameron and his party conspire to create a European shambles … The Prime Minister's concessions over the EU referendum have eroded his authority … The tragedy for David Cameron is that before this latest farcical episode of The Muppet Show, he had arrived at a perfectly sensible policy … – UK TelegraphDominant Social Theme: We are the Tories and have always stood agains...Read More