At the end of 2019, Germans lined up outside gold stores to buy gold. The reason? The German government was lowering the limit on anonymous purchases of gold from €10,000 to €2,000. The way gold prices are going, pretty soon even purchasing a single one-ounce gold coin will require buyers to provide identification. It’s no wonder that Germans went...
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...
Investors always have a lot on their minds, particularly when it comes to saving for retirement. They’re always trying to figure out which way markets will move, when they’ll move, and what assets they should invest in to maximize their retirement savings. The more uncertainty faces them, the more difficult their investment decision making becomes. In the aftermath of the...
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...
The coming of the new year has traditionally been a time for people to make resolutions about how they’ll improve their way of living in the year ahead. It’s become famous in some circles to joke about those resolutions, and how few people stick to them. That’s particularly true when it comes to exercise and fitness. But while many people...
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...
