In what could be an ominous sign indicating a deterioration of the financial health of American households, levels of credit card debt have risen over the past year, with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York noting that the “flow into 90+ day delinquency for credit card balances has been increasing notably for the last year.” That’s a piece...
No matter which way stock markets are moving, there are always people trying to understand why they go up or down, or which way they’ll move in the future. It can be tough to weed out the important commentary from the downright false, as many pundits have a vested interest in seeing markets move one way or another. But...
Will he or won’t he? That’s the question everyone is asking about the nuclear summit between the United States and North Korea. Will President Trump pull the plug on the summit, or will it go ahead as scheduled? With all the back and forth, no one seems to know for sure. And that uncertainty has weighed on stock markets,...
After an amazing two-year run in which stock markets gained 60% in value, the past three months have seen stocks take a long hiatus. With the Dow trading mostly in the 24-25,000 point range, markets are largely waiting to see what direction the economy will take. On the positive side, the Trump tax cuts have put billions of dollars into...
Many investment advisers take a dim view of investing in gold. They’ll try to push their clients into stocks and bonds, CDs, and various other financial investments. If gold even gets a mention, it might get a recommendation to make up about 3-5% of an investor’s portfolio. Even billionaires like Warren Buffet denigrate the importance of gold, which is...
Every year the financial media await the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder meeting, relishing the opportunity to run interviews with Warren Buffett. Buffett didn’t disappoint this year, speaking freely about his thoughts on a number of issues. Among them was the idea of gold as an investment, which Buffett rejected. The media reported his statements on gold with not even...
We haven’t heard its name bandied about much in recent years, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still a major threat: inflation. As John Maynard Keynes once wrote: Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved,...
For over one hundred years, monetary policy in the United States has been the purview of the Federal Reserve System. Over that period, the dollar’s value has decreased by over 96% as the Fed has pursued loose monetary policy for decade after decade. Yet despite that abysmal performance, the policymakers at the Fed still consider themselves to be monetary...
A new legislative provision making its way through Congress highlights just how little most Congressmen know about financial and banking stability. The changes that Congress wants to make are being touted as beneficial to small banks, but they could end up making the banking system much less stable and lead to more bank failures in the future. While most people...
Stock markets took another beating last week as the trade war between the United States and China threatened to intensify. After President Trump slapped $50 billion worth of tariffs on China, China retaliated by placing the same amount of tariffs on imports from the US. Then President Trump decided to up the ante and floated the idea of a...
