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The US federal government’s financial accounts end each year on September 30th. Last week the Treasury Department reported the government’s financial position for the fiscal year ended 2016, and it does not look good. I will ignore for the moment the government’s negative net worth, which itself means that the federal government owes more thanRead more

The following exchange occurred on December 18, 1912 when J.P. Morgan – the most influential American financier and banker of his time – was called to testify before Congress. Mr Untermyer: I want to ask you a few questions bearing on the subject that you have touched upon this morning, as to the control ofRead more

Thursday, June 23rd is the day voters in Great Britain will decide whether their country will leave the European Union, an outcome dubbed “Brexit”. The debate leading up to the vote is becoming fierce, and long simmering disagreements within the Conservative Party to “Leave” or “Remain” in the EU are now boiling over. Prime MinisterRead more

Here’s a question that might have you pondering: Is gold a commodity? More importantly, are we doing a disservice to the gold industry by calling gold a commodity? These may sound like silly questions, but hear me out. Last month I participated as a keynote speaker at the Asia Mining Conference in Singapore. There wereRead more

No one can predict the future, but charts can provide a useful roadmap to help guide us through uncertainty. Charts do this because they illustrate price trends – whether up, down or sideways – and it is always important to keep your investment portfolio in harmony with the trend. The following weekly chart of Bitcoin’sRead more

Yesterday’s speech by Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen roiled markets across the globe. Any increase in US dollar interest rates has been postponed yet again. As a consequence, it is not surprising that the dollar tanked, and gold jumped higher in a spell of <frenetic short-covering>. While Fed officials often speak in a nuanced way,Read more

In testimony before Congress in 1912, J.P. Morgan, the leading financier of his day, declared: “Money is gold, nothing else.” A century later a diametrically opposing view was taken by Wall Street legend Warren Buffett who proclaimed that gold “has no utility” and that “anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head” trying toRead more

The following silver chart will be familiar to everyone who follows my work. I first presented this pattern in my newsletter about twenty years ago, and I have been tracking it closely ever since, though recently there has been a twist to the way this pattern has developed. I have been describing silver’s long-term chartRead more

In an interview on July 8th in King World News I noted how gold that day had slipped into backwardation. Since then I have read a lot of commentary on various websites about backwardation, which made clear to me that this term and, more importantly, the implications to the gold price when backwardation appears areRead more

At the beginning of the year, I wrote: “The financial system has become so abnormal, the Fed has to keep inflating to prevent the system from literally going off the rails. But the irony is that eventually the financial system dies as a consequence of accumulated inflation.” I then went on to identify three thingsRead more