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 are our Bridges Falling? The Economics of the Infrastructure Deficit …Tonight I turned on the news to learn that a major bridge over the Skagit River on Washingon State's I-5 had fallen down. The bridge is not far from where I live. I have driven over it more times than I like to think. Why did it fall? The proximate cause is clear: A large truck, carrying an oversize load, hit a cru...Read More

Austerity About-Face: German Government to Gamble on Stimulus … With the euro crisis refusing to relent, the German government is backing away from its austerity mandates and planning to spend billions to stimulate ailing economies in Southern European. But can the program succeed? Wolfgang Schäuble sounded almost like a new convert extolling the wonders of heaven as he raved about his...Read More

The Bank of Japan must crush all resistance, and will do so … Kudos to Kyle Bass at Hayman Advisers for warning that the Bank of Japan would lose control of its ¥70 trillion bond buying blitz. The spike in the 10-year yield to 1pc on Thursday was certainly shocking to behold. His point is that the BoJ faces a "rational investor paradox". The authorities are trying to drive up t...Read More

Don't fear the bubble …The bubblista side of the argument, at heart, says that the flood of money being poured into the global economy by the world's central banks is driving up asset prices to well beyond fundamental valuations, and that if and when valuations revert to sanity, the unwind (the "burst") could be disastrous in all manner of unpredictable ways. This is a pred...Read More

Europe needs Britain, says ECB president Mario Draghi … Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, has issued a plea for a more co-operative Britain to stay in Europe. – UK TelegraphDominant Social Theme: Europe will do what we tell it to do.Free-Market Analysis: We have noticed recently that the top Eurocrats seem a bit more frazzled than usual. We wrote about a recent arti...Read More

Sen Al Franken (D-MN) was using such a circuitous "serpentine" walking pattern in an effort to avoid TRN's Jason Mattera's tough question that he inadvertently body checked one of his own staffers in the process. The absurd weaving to avoid the tough inquiry even brought the senator to laughter at one point as the beleaguered staffer tried to run interference for Franken by claim...Read More

The European Union's unending quandary … The pace of European disintegration continues to quicken. Recession deepens in the 17-member euro zone; it is now the longest downturn since the currency was launched in 2000. The union will survive only by becoming minimalist. Europeans – who are first of all Germans, French, Italians, Poles, Brits and others – may distrust their poli...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