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

Give Edward Snowden what he deserves … I depart America for two blissful weeks in Italy and return to find that my country has been transformed, rather rudely, into a totalitarian state on the order of Iran, possibly even North Korea. My telephone is directly plugged into something called PRISM. Big Brother hounds my email, even when I am only viewing the weather. Soon I shall be wearing a M...Read More

Markets suffer too much central bank attention … That restatement of Goodhart's Law is almost perfectly appropriate to today's financial markets. Bonds, stocks, currencies and commodities have all become treacherous terrain for investors. Charles Goodhart, a British economist, developed his law in 1975. He was worried about the central bank orthodoxy of the day, the belief that monet...Read More

The fact is markets had gone up too far and too fast … A number of different factors have combined to create the impression of a co-ordinated slide, but the causes of the various market wobbles are subtly different. The proximate trigger for the market slide was Ben Bernanke's appearance before a Congressional committee at which he hinted that the Fed's monetary largesse will not go...Read More

Italian showdown with Germany over euro looms closer … Italy's simmering revolt against Germany, austerity and its own ultra-European elites is coming to a head again, in a reminder that the deep clash of interests between the euro's north and south remains as bitter as ever … Silvio Berlusconi called for a showdown, or 'Braccio di Ferro', with northern powers before It...Read More

Is Edward Snowden's story unravelling? Why the Guardian's scoop is looking a bit dodgy … Questions are being raised about Snowden's background and motivations Now that the dust has settled after the Edward Snowden affair, it's time to ask some tough questions about The Guardian's scoop of the week. Snowden's story is that he dropped a $200,000 a year job and a (very a...Read More

Last week, media reports emerged that the US government is requiring vast amounts of data from Internet and phone companies via top secret surveillance programs. The revelations, which confirm many of our worst fears, raise serious questions about individual privacy protections, checks on government power and court orders impacting some of the most popular Web services. Today Mozilla is launching...Read More

NSA director to get a public grilling in the Senate … General Keith Alexander, commander of the U.S. Cyber Command, testifies before the House Armed Services Committee on September 23, 2010 on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. … As pressure mounts for the intelligence community to curb its surveillance activities or at least make them more transparent, a key National Security Agency off...Read More

Saving for retirement? We wish we hadn't bothered, say one in 10 … More than 10pc of people who are saving for retirement wish they hadn't bothered and one in five fears that it's a waste of money, research suggests. The past five years of economic and financial turmoil have left almost three quarters of retirement savers less confident in the ability of stock market investing to...Read More

The surveillance state is even bigger, and scarier, than we thought. And, as a result, it's time that we broke up the failed national security experiment known as the Department of Homeland Security. Returning to dozens of independent agencies will return internal checks-and-balances to within the Executive branch, and actually make us both safer and less likely to be the victims of government...Read More

David Cameron: We can't run away from Europe … Britain's "bloated welfare state" and "under-performing education system" are the key areas of national weakness – but the nation's membership of the European Union should be seen as a strength, the Prime Minister will say today. David Cameron will warn that the country faces a battle for its economic future...Read More

EU Should Move Beyond Carbon Market to Shut Coal, IEA Says … The European Union needs to think of other ways to prevent new coal-fired power stations from being built because its carbon market won't achieve that this decade, according to the International Energy Agency. Nations should consider measures including bans of new and inefficient plants known as "sub-critical," unless...Read More

House Speaker John Boehner: NSA Leaker a 'Traitor' … House Speaker John Boehner today called NSA leaker Edward Snowden a "traitor" who put Americans at risk by releasing classified information to the media. "He's a traitor," the highest ranking Republican in the House of Representatives said in an extensive interview with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos. &...Read More

Manufactured Hero Edward Snowden – The NSA Whistleblower Exposed as Career NSA, CIA, Special Forces Trained Agent … Oh yeah, he didn't tell us [anything] that we didn't already know. Yeah, he's a hero. UPDATE: Booz Allen Hamilton huh? Do you know who owns them, who our hero really works for? The Carlyle Group. Booz Allen Hamilton, like its rival SAIC, is involved in virtual...Read More

Building America's secret surveillance state … "God we trust," goes an old National Security Agency joke. "All others we monitor. Given the revelations last week about the NSA's domestic spying activities, the saying seems more prophecy than humor. First, the Guardian reported details on a domestic telephone dragnet in which Verizon was forced to give the NSA details a...Read More

Neoliberalism has spawned a financial elite who hold governments to ransom … The International Monetary Fund has admitted that some of the decisions it made in the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis were wrong, and that the €130bn first bailout of Greece was "bungled"… The problem is that the ruthless sentimentalists of neoliberalism like to tell themselves – a...Read More

The Mystery of Why Portugal Is So Doomed … Did relying too heavily on mom-and-pop businesses hobble one of Europe's most imperiled countries? It's possible. Every unhappy family might be unhappy in its own way, but the same isn't quite true of every unhappy euro country. The common currency's troubled economies all relied on foreign borrowing during the boom, and all went kap...Read More

As a candidate, Barack Obama vowed to bring a different, better kind of leadership to the dysfunctional capital. He'd make government more efficient, accountable and transparent. He'd rise above the "small-ball" nature of doing business. And he'd work with Republicans to break Washington paralysis. You can trust me, Obama said back in 2008. And – for a while, at least &...Read More

Surveillance revelations deepen European fears of Web giants … Europeans reacted angrily on Friday to revelations that U.S. authorities had tapped the servers of Internet companies for personal data, saying such activity confirmed their worst fears about American Web giants' reach and showed tighter regulations were needed. – ReutersDominant Social Theme: We need more government re...Read More

British Intelligence watchdog flies to Washington to demand answers on snooping scandal … MPs from Britain's intelligence watchdog will to fly to Washington next week to seek guarantees that US spies are not snooping on Britons' emails. Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee, told The Daily Telegraph: 'We will get a report and decide if any f...Read More

Employment is still near a 30-year low …The employment-population ratio has barely changed in three years, showing that 58.6% of U.S. adults over age 16 had a job as of April. Forget the unemployment rate. The employment rate – the percentage of adult Americans who hold a job – has barely budged in the past three years. It's hovering near its lowest level in three decades, an...Read More