A solid year for the metals
2019 was a solid year for precious metals, with gold up $231 (18.5%) and silver up $2.40 (16.4%) since this time last year. Still, not much attention has been paid to the metals on the financial networks.
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2019 was a solid year for precious metals, with gold up $231 (18.5%) and silver up $2.40 (16.4%) since this time last year. Still, not much attention has been paid to the metals on the financial networks.
Currently there is much speculation about whether the Fed will continue quantitative tightening or return to quantitative easing. In 2018, newly appointed Fed Chair Jay Powell indicated that 2019 would see four rate hikes. However, he has since backed off on that forecast.
But, a repeal of Dodd-Frank is not without its downside risks and upside benefits for gold and silver investors. The 2010 enacted Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank) will be eviscerated when the House passes an amendment to the law. Because the Senate passed the amendment with a bipartisan vote, the House
Worldwide, gold ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds) increased their holdings 8.4% in 2017. Collectively, they now own 2,363 tons, having added 197.5 tons for the year. By comparison, the U.S. Treasury claims to own the world’s largest horde of gold at 8,133.5 tons; Germany, second place, claims 3,373.6 tons. Since 2003, only in 2009 did ETFs
A little over a year ago, the IMF announced that the renminbi, China’s currency, would be added the IMF’s “basket of currencies” that makes up SDRs (Special Drawing Rights). A loud outcry ensued from many pro-gold analysts that the inclusion would mean the end of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency and would result
China has come a long way since the days of Richard Nixon’s and Henry Kissinger’s “Ping Pong Diplomacy.” Its economy has grown to be the world’s second largest economy, and its manufacturing base is home to consumer products used around the globe. Now, China has broken into a nearly century-old financial club, the London Bullion
When the Dodd-Frank law was adopted with its vast increase in bank regulatory authority, the “too big to fail” problem was made permanent. In the name of never bailing out the banks again, new regulations have been imposed and some other financial services (like hedge funds and insurance companies) have been swept into the same
So wrote Gillian Tett in Friday’s Financial Times. Mr. Tett started his piece by noting that Nigeria’s central bank had announced that it would convert almost a 10th of Nigeria’s $43 billion reserves from dollars to renminbi. Tett went on to acknowledge that only 0.01 percent of the world’s central bank reserves are now held
There is no great challenge to being successful when you have the sole legal right to create new money. On the other hand, convincing the American people and Congress to go along with such a scheme through the creation of a third central bank, the Federal Reserve, was no small task. But with that task
When the Fed announced that it would not immediately begin reducing (tapering) its “asset purchases,” that was a watershed moment, and it will have tremendous impact on the gold and silver markets in the years ahead. For decades, Keynesian economists have asserted that governments can manage economies by deficit spending and money manipulation. Basic to
