Is bitcoin just a fad? Is the yield curve indicating a slowdown? Austria elects 31-year-old anti-immigration populist. Stock markets rise, become even more overvalued. New fires break out in California. Trump deals Obamacare a serious blow. Gold and silver falling again. Trump Russia probe continues to expand. Best Of The Web Chartbook “In […]
Top Ten Videos — October 17
Is today’s economy 1937 all over again? What happens if liquidity dries up? Who will leave the EU next? Is Novo Resources the next big thing in gold?
Really Bad Ideas, Part 5: The Fed Should Have – And Defend – An Inflation Target
Central banks in general and the Fed in particular are struggling to understand a world in which they’ve thrown everything they have at the economy without generating “beneficial” inflation. Their confusion can be traced back to some profoundly false assumptions. Here’s a good overview of the current debate: Fed ‘should defend’ inflation target or risk […]
Can A Company Be Great And A Great Short?
One of the fascinating things about financial bubbles is how they transform great companies into screaming short sale candidates. Put another way, bear markets tend to throw even the prettiest babies out with the bathwater. Here, for instance, is what happened to Cisco Systems, the dominant maker of networking gear (the devices that run the […]
The Real Peak Complacency
Stocks are at record highs while volatility is at a record low. Which is another way of saying that investors aren’t as worried as they probably should be about the coming year. That’s okay. Price corrections (with their attendant volatility spikes) are normal and natural ways for markets to teach overconfident investors a little humility. […]
Rationality Versus The Market
The late stages of financial bubbles are always tough for rational analysts. Focused as they are on the numbers, such analysts are relatively immune to the emotion that drives the action at market extremes, so they find themselves making predictions that turn out to be “wrong” for months and sometimes years. Then the cycle turns […]
Thunder Down Under: Some Australian Junior Gold Miners Take Off
Gold mining stocks have been treading water for what seems like forever. But in a remote part of Australia, a potentially big find by a tiny exploration company is generating some welcome excitement. The story in a nutshell: Back in the 1990s, Newmont Mining geologist Quinton Hennigh came up with a novel theory about the […]
Really Bad Ideas, Part 4: Federal Flood Insurance
As Hurricanes Harvey and Irma wreaked their havoc over the past couple of weeks, several interconnected questions popped up, the answers to which make us look, to put it bluntly, like idiots. Why, for instance, are there suddenly so many Cat 4 and 5 hurricanes? Is this due to man-made climate change and is this […]
Suddenly, “De-Dollarization” Is A Thing
For what seems like decades, other countries have been tiptoeing away from their dependence on the US dollar. China, Russia, and India have cut deals in which they agree to accept each others’ currencies for bi-lateral trade while Europe, obviously, designed the euro to be a reserve asset and international medium of exchange. These were […]
Looks Like The COT Report Wins Again, As Gold And Silver Fall Sharply
Eventually physical demand for precious metals will swamp the games being played in the paper (i.e., futures contract) markets. So every time the commitment of traders report (COT), which tracks those paper games, turns bearish while gold and silver continue to rise, the precious metals community watches hopefully for signs that fundamentals are at long […]
Welcome To The Third World, Part 25: Losing Faith In College
One of the hallmarks of a successful society is the widespread belief that education is a key to success. For that to be true there have to be 1) enough jobs farther up the food chain to make four more years of studying worthwhile, and 2) schools that are good and cheap enough to make […]
The Empire Strikes Back – At Bitcoin
One of the uncertainties with cryptocurrencies has always been how governments would react once bitcoin and its kin got big enough to actually threaten the monopolies of national fiat currencies. That day seemed to be approaching as cryptocurrencies’ aggregate market cap blew through $100 billion and the pipeline of new bitcoin wannabes (initial coin offerings, […]
Lightening-Fast COT Reversal: Now Fairly Bearish For Gold And Silver
That didn’t take long at all. Just a few weeks after the Commitment of Traders (COT) Reports for gold and silver turned positive – setting off a nice rally in both metals’ prices – this indicator has flipped back to strongly negative. In gold especially, speculators (always wrong at big turning points) have loaded up […]
High-Profile Sectors Start To Roll Over
Long credit cycles like the current one always end with a crash. But first they deteriorate. The headline numbers remain positive while under the surface a growing list of sectors start to falter. It’s only when the latter reach a critical mass that market psychology turns dark. How far along is this process today? Pretty […]
Social Media Teaches Neo-Nazis — And Everyone Else — An Important Lesson
The white supremacists who descended on Charlottesville, VA last weekend seem to have forgotten why their grandpappies wore hoods on such occasions: If regular folks find out you’re crazy, they tend not to like you as much. Combine those exposed neo-Nazi faces with ubiquitous smart phones and the result is the mass-outing of hundreds of […]
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