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

Hamilton City Council backs living wage … Hamilton City Council's lowest-paid staff could receive more than $100 a week after a trailblazing decision to lift workers' minimum pay rates. The council is set to become the first city in the country to adopt a living wage policy guaranteeing its staff an hourly wage of at least $18.40. In a fiercely debated decision the council voted to i...Read More

Don't be fooled: Gold is no currency … An investment in search of a believable story …Gold is an investment in search of a story — or at least one that's true more often than not. That's not to say there aren't lots of tales told around gold … Gold bugs spun that yarn on the notion that paper currencies — especially the dollar — were having their...Read More

Goldman: Four Reasons Why the Market is Going Much Higher … Last night's much-buzzed about research report from Goldman Sachs, in which the firm lays out its new S&P targets, contains an interesting rationale for higher stock prices. Rather than making the bull case based on earnings growth, Goldman believes that the 2% dividend yield on the S&P 500 will serve as a rising floor...Read More

Derivatives Reform on the Ropes … New rules to regulate derivatives, adopted last week by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, are a victory for Wall Street and a setback for financial reform. They may also signal worse things to come … The regulations, required under the Dodd-Frank reform law, are intended to impose transparency and competition on the notoriously opaque multitril...Read More

Too soon to dial back Fed stimulus … It is too soon to determine whether to dial down the Federal Reserve's massive bond-buying program, and the economic picture may not be clear enough to make that decision for another three or four months, an influential U.S. central bank official said. New York Fed President William Dudley, a close ally of Chairman Ben Bernanke, said on Bloomberg TV t...Read More

Liberalism not at fault for recent scandals … If in any of these situations even one person of influence had adhered to the basic tenets of liberalism all of these scandals could have been avoided … Never mind that there is zero correlation between the political ideology called liberalism and the cascading scandals of the Obama administration. If anything, it's the opposite: it'...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