White House economics adviser Larry Kudlow caused some raised eyebrows last Friday with his call for the Fed to immediately cut its target federal funds rate by 50 basis points. According to Kudlow, the Fed never should have raised interest rates above 2%. Despite protestations that the economy is fundamentally healthy, the call for an immediate interest rate belies...
Every month seems to bring conflicting data from the housing market, with occasional bits of rosy data eventually overwhelmed by negative data. It’s no secret that houses across the country are incredibly expensive. It’s not even just the large metro areas such as San Francisco, New York, and Washington, DC that are affected either. Even interior states such as...
Original Forbes article published on March 24, 2019. If you’re looking at investing in gold to protect your retirement assets, you’re likely in it for the long haul. But that doesn’t mean that you’re oblivious to moves in the price of gold. After all, you want to buy when the gold price is as low as possible and sell (when...
Market watchers have been looking for months for signs that a recession is on the horizon. Despite all the negative economic news, from a weak housing market to falling job growth to decreased international trade, stock markets still remain at historically high levels. But now investors have the indicator they need to know that a recession is only months...
The Federal Open Market Committee’s (FOMC) meeting last week was nothing less than earth-shattering in terms of its ramifications for financial markets. While many analysts had thought that one rate hike this year might be within the realm of possibility, the Fed all but shut the door on that happening. More importantly, the Fed indicated that it not only...
Every week seems to bring more and more news that the economy, if it isn’t already in recession, is well on its way to recession. This time it’s bad news from the manufacturing sector, which like most other sectors of the economy underperformed versus economists’ expectations. Factory orders barely rose in January, up 0.1 percent versus the 0.3 percent...
This week’s Federal Open Market Committee meeting will be one of the most highly-observed in recent years, as markets look to discern whether or not the Fed will continue to raise interest rates this year. The FOMC statement is probably going to be of less importance this time around than the press conference and the summary of economic projections...
There’s a crisis lurking in markets that many investors remain completely unaware of. While attention is focused on stock market levels, job hiring, and oil prices, one major market remains, as it often has been, overlooked by the majority of investors. And weakness in that market could set off a series of forced sales that could have a domino...
After two years of keeping its gold reserves static, the Chinese government has begun ramping up its gold purchases in recent months. Its gold-buying binge has entered a third straight month, with another 10 tons of metal added in February to its official reserves. It’s worth noting, however, that it’s widely assumed that China under-reports its official reserves in...
For those who continue to hope for a return to economic normalcy, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s testimony last week was bitterly disappointing. Anyone hoping for an end to accommodative monetary policy and a return to market-determined prices for assets has much longer to wait. The Fed has barely run off a little more than ten percent of its over-bloated balance...