It isn’t every day that you hear someone in the mainstream financial media talk about gold. When they do, it’s often in a pejorative manner. So to hear someone in the financial media talking about gold reaching $1,700 or $1,800 an ounce is quite uncommon. And the fact that the person making those statements is none other than Jim...
When judging how their investment portfolios will perform, most investors look at economic factors to estimate future performance. They’ll look at price to earnings ratios, balance sheets, Federal Reserve monetary policy, and a whole host of other measures to assess the likelihood that their investments will gain or lose money. But what they often fail to take into account...
Next to stocks, bonds, and cash, gold is probably the top investment asset when it comes both to investor interest and common curiosity. Cultures across the world and throughout history have valued gold for its scarcity, durability, and use in jewelry and money. Now that gold is no longer used as money, its primary use in society today is as...
Many investors think of gold as a hedge against economic turmoil, inflation, and financial crisis. And with the economy slowing, stock markets near all-time highs and poised for a crash, and the Federal Reserve returning to its money-printing ways, savvy investors have already made the move to invest their portfolios in gold. But while that has helped gold gain...
For over 200 years, gold has been the most important precious metal in the world. It was once the linchpin of the international monetary system, and in a way still anchors the workings of the world’s central banks. Even though it no longer features as prominently as a currency, it nonetheless retains its importance. Gold has a number of attributes...
One of the characteristic traits of an economy that is circling the drain is one in which the central bank directly monetizes the debt issued by the government. Once that starts to happen, there is no check on the government’s ability to spend money, and the currency unit quickly becomes more and more worthless. We’ve seen this happen in...
One of the dominant themes in markets today is the vast amount of near-junk grade debt that’s floating around out there. Corporate debt levels are nearly double what they were during the financial crisis, and in terms of corporate debt to GDP, we’re at levels that we last saw at the top of the last two market crashes. That...
At the beginning of the year, the Federal Reserve was expected to hike interest rates at least twice. Instead, it cut rates three times. What should we expect in 2020? With numerous analysts and strategists warning about the likelihood of a major stock market crash in 2020, it’s all but guaranteed that the Fed will have to drop rates even...
Many people look at surging stock markets, and especially hot stocks like Amazon and Netflix, and think that they can make it big investing in stocks. Yet very few investors are actually able to make market-beating stock gains, let alone even match the market. The sooner they understand that, the sooner they’ll be able to make investment decisions that...
As 2019 winds to a close, stock markets continue to see record highs. It’s a lot different than this time last year, when markets were plummeting to end the year. So what has changed? Well, the Federal Reserve decided to plow another few hundred billion dollars into financial markets to end the year, with that money finding its way to...
