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In 1992 a book entitled “Bankruptcy 1995: The Coming Collapse of America and How to Stop It” hit the nation by storm. Written by Harry Figgie, a prominent businessman who had built a Fortune 500 company, and Gerald Swanson, an economics professor with expertise in public finance, it forecast that the US federal government wouldRead more

Every bull market for each type of financial instrument has three phases: accumulation of an undervalued asset by so-called “smart money” that recognizes the undervaluation, growing public participation as the uptrend gains increasing attention, and inevitable speculation that leads to overvaluation of an asset and eventual resumption of a new downtrend.   Gold is nowRead more

Note: This article is based on my presentation to the Mines & Money Conference on 27 November 2017. Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. The title of my presentation is “Positioning Yourself for a New Bull Market in Gold”. I highlighted ’New’ because gold’s bull market actually began a century ago when central banks started takingRead more

Transferring Power to the People Of the many significant statements made by President Donald Trump in his inaugural address, I believe the following stands out: Today, we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another or from one party to another, but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it backRead more

The US federal government’s financial accounts end each year on September 30th. Last week the Treasury Department reported the government’s financial position for the fiscal year ended 2016, and it does not look good. I will ignore for the moment the government’s negative net worth, which itself means that the federal government owes more thanRead more

Thursday, June 23rd is the day voters in Great Britain will decide whether their country will leave the European Union, an outcome dubbed “Brexit”. The debate leading up to the vote is becoming fierce, and long simmering disagreements within the Conservative Party to “Leave” or “Remain” in the EU are now boiling over. Prime MinisterRead more

No one can predict the future, but charts can provide a useful roadmap to help guide us through uncertainty. Charts do this because they illustrate price trends – whether up, down or sideways – and it is always important to keep your investment portfolio in harmony with the trend. The following weekly chart of Bitcoin’sRead more

Yesterday’s speech by Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen roiled markets across the globe. Any increase in US dollar interest rates has been postponed yet again. As a consequence, it is not surprising that the dollar tanked, and gold jumped higher in a spell of <frenetic short-covering>. While Fed officials often speak in a nuanced way,Read more

In testimony before Congress in 1912, J.P. Morgan, the leading financier of his day, declared: “Money is gold, nothing else.” A century later a diametrically opposing view was taken by Wall Street legend Warren Buffett who proclaimed that gold “has no utility” and that “anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head” trying toRead more

At the beginning of the year, I wrote: “The financial system has become so abnormal, the Fed has to keep inflating to prevent the system from literally going off the rails. But the irony is that eventually the financial system dies as a consequence of accumulated inflation.” I then went on to identify three thingsRead more