October 2019
More Than Half of All Banks Won’t Survive the Next Financial Crisis: Is Yours One of Them?
Over a decade removed from the financial crisis, you would think that banks and financial institutions had learned their lesson from the crisis. With the banking system supposedly on the verge of collapse in 2008, only an enormous government bailout and massive injections of liquidity from the Federal Reserve System staved off a complete collapse. But have banks learned...
Solved: Can I Buy Gold with My 401(k)?
There’s no better way to accumulate wealth than by saving and investing. Merely socking money away into a bank account won’t grow your wealth. That money that you save needs to be put to work for you gaining returns. But many diligent savers don’t know where to invest their money. While stocks and bonds have been traditional investment vehicles in...
The Rich Are Getting Richer – The Rest of Us Aren’t
If you feel like your cost of living is increasing but your salary isn’t keeping pace, you’re not alone. The median American household’s inflation-adjusted income hasn’t budged in 20 years. But life is getting more expensive, with food, education, and healthcare costs continuing to rise above the rate of inflation. And with Americans terrified of losing their money in...
The Debt Bubble Is So Bad That Greece Is Now Issuing Negative Interest Rate Debt
One of the most confusing and frightening aspects of the current debt bubble is the fact that there is so much negative interest rate debt in the world today. From $12 trillion of negative debt earlier this summer, it peaked at over $17 trillion in late August. That means that investors around the world invested $17 trillion of their...
Gold ETF Holdings Hit All-Time High
While investing in gold exchange-traded funds (ETFs) may not be the best choice for most investors, there’s no doubt that they remain popular with many mainstream investors. And because data on private gold investment remains difficult to come by, investment in gold ETFs can be a useful proxy for overall private demand in the gold market. By that measure,...
The Federal Reserve’s QE4 Will Wreck the Economy
If you thought that quantitative easing was a thing of the past, a response to the financial crisis that was dead and buried, think again. Not only is it not a relic, it is a policy response that has now become the Fed’s number one policy tool. Every time something potentially negative affects the economy, the Fed will now...
Why Gold ETFs Are a Bad Idea
A major trend in investing over the past decade has been the tremendous growth of exchange-traded funds (ETFs). ETFs have sprouted up to offer investors the ability to invest in a number of different assets, some of which they otherwise would have great difficulty investing in. That has opened up the range of investment options and allowed ordinary investors...
Global Manufacturing Has Contracted Spectacularly
While the mainstream financial media tries to put a rosy spin on the economy and make us believe that everything is going well, under the hood things aren’t looking so good. Forget about mainstream employment numbers such as the unemployment rate or the number of jobs created. The real gauge of the economy’s strength is how much is being...