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Latest Treasure, Fed and BIS Reports Confirm: All Twisted Paths Lead to Gold

November 24, 2021

https://goldswitzerland.com/latest-treasury-fed-and-bis-reports-confirm-all-twisted-paths-lead-to-gold/

The Gross Misunderstanding of Central Banks

November 24, 2021

The Gross Misunderstanding of Central Banks

«The Fed Reminds Me of a Speculator Who Is on the Wrong Side of the Market»

November 20, 2021

«The Fed Reminds Me of a Speculator Who Is on the Wrong Side of the Market»

Jim Grant, editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, warns of the rampant speculation in the stock market. He worries that the central banks are underestimating the threat of persistently high inflation and explains why gold has a bright future.

The financial markets are «high». In the U.S., the S&P 500 is up for seven straight days, closing on another record at the end of last week. Particularly in demand are red-hot stocks like Tesla and Nvidia with fantastically rich valuations. Together, the two companies have gained around $600 billion in market value in the past three weeks alone.

For Jim Grant, this is an environment that calls for increased caution. According to the editor of the iconic investment bulletin «Grant’s Interest Rate Observer», investors have to beware of an explosive cocktail combining exceptionally easy monetary policy, a pronounced appetite for speculation, and the high degree of leverage. He also thinks that central banks are underestimating the risk of persistent inflation.

«We have one of the most speculative Zeitgeists on record»: Jim Grant.

(Photo: Bloomberg)

«The Fed reminds me of a speculator who is on the wrong side of the market», says Mr. Grant. The fact that the Federal Reserve is now beginning to taper its bond purchases makes little difference in his view. «It’s like pouring a little less gasoline on the fire,» he thinks.

In this in-depth interview with The Market/NZZ, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, the outspoken market observer and contrarian investor compares today’s environment with the second half of the 1960s and explains why he expects persistently high inflation rates. He explains what this means for the dollar as well as for gold, and where the best investment opportunities are with respect to the challenge of global warming.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Perversity: Thy Name is Dollar

November 17, 2021

Perversity: Thy Name is Dollar

If you ask most people, “what is money?” they will answer that money is the generally accepted medium of exchange. If you ask Google Images, it will show you many pictures of green pieces of paper. Virtually everyone agrees that money means the dollar.

Image credit: Cildo Meireles

Breaking Down the Dollar Monetary System

What does it mean to have a dollar? If you hold a piece of paper with green ink on it, which says “ONE DOLLAR”, you may notice that it also says, at the top, “FEDERAL RESERVE NOTE”. Note is a word for credit. The dollar bill (bill is also a word for a credit instrument) is a credit of some kind, the credit of the Federal Reserve. The paper itself has no value, apart from that it is the obligation of a party whose full faith and credit is beyond question. It would be something like the fallacy of reification, to confuse the green piece of paper with the monetary value it represents.

Banking, Lending and the Fed

Most holders of dollars do not hold them in the form of actual pieces of paper. For reasons of convenience, and safety and security, people deposit them in a bank. That is, they may think of it as having dollars in a bank (just as they think of the paper as the money). But let’s drill down into that. Most people know that the bank does not just put all the green pieces of paper into a vault. The bank holds a small amount of paper cash, based on what it expects to pay during the business day. The rest, well, the bank does something–or–other with them…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

People Blame the Federal Reserve & Never Politicians

November 15, 2021

People Blame the Federal Reserve & Never Politicians

Every now and again I get those stupid hate emails to blame the federal reserve and central banks for everything while NEVER once do they ever look at the history of central banks and how Congress has been manipulating the law changing the definition of what the Fed was even supposed to be.

There do not even know why there are branches of the Fed. If there was just one interest rate and one policy set in Washington, then why do we even have branches of the Fed if they no longer act independently? For you see, when the Fed was created, the branches were to manage the capital flows. Each branch was independent and they would lower or raise the interest rate in their jurisdiction depend ding on the flow of money.

Even the currency it first began to print was done so by each branch. The Panic of 1907 was instigated by the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 which caused the capital to flow from East to West and that created a shortage of cash in New York and thus banks failed.

It was Roosevelt who usurped all the independence of the Fed and created a Washington monopoly to push his socialist agenda into place. We are hearing the same pitch of equality once again and Biden is going to take over the Fed and install his people. This will be the final alteration of the Fed making it entirely political to usher in this Great Reset. What was once an independent central bank, owned by the bankers to prevent taxpayer money from being used to bail out the banks where today they banks may own the Fed in name only, but the reins of power are political.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Mainstream Has the Inflation Story Backwards

November 4, 2021

The Mainstream Has the Inflation Story Backwards

The mainstream blames inflation on “supply chain bottlenecks.” But they have it completely backward. In reality, Federal Reserve-created inflation is causing the supply chain mess.

According to Biden administration talking points, the economy is booming. Americans are flush with cash. And they are demanding lots of goods. The supply chain simply can’t keep up. That’s why we’re seeing empty shelves and rising prices. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg summed up the mainstream mantra.

Demand is up … because income is up, because the president has successfully guided this economy out of the teeth of a terrifying recession.”

White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told a similar tale. She said we have supply chain problems because “people have more money … their wages are up … we’ve seen an economic recovery that is underway.”

This sounds like a lot of spin. But in one sense, the mainstream is right. As Mises Institute Senior Editor Ryan McMaken pointed out in a recent article on the Mises Wire, they are correct when it comes to consumer demand and spending, even if they got it right for the wrong reason.

As Mihai Macovei showed earlier this month, the global volume of trade and shipping volume in 2021 have actually exceeded prepandemic numbers. For example, in the port of Los Angeles, ‘loaded imports’ and ‘total imports’ for the 2020–21 fiscal year (ending June 30, 2021) were both up when compared to the same period of the 2018–19 fiscal year. In other words, it’s not as if little is moving through these ports. In fact, more is moving through them than ever before. That suggests demand is indeed higher.”

But why is demand so much higher? As Psaki said, Americans have more money in their pockets. Wages are up nominally. But it’s not because the economy is booming. As McMaken points out, it’s due to inflation.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Artificially Low Interest Rates? So what?

November 3, 2021

Artificially Low Interest Rates? So what?

The Federal Reserve has held interest rates artificially low for decades. Even after pushing rates to zero in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, “normalization” only managed to raise rates to 2.5% — hardly “normal.” The central bank began cutting rates in 2019, even before the coronavirus pandemic.

But what difference does it make? Why do artificially low interest rates matter? Peter Schiff explains in this clip from his podcast.

In the first place, artificially low interest rates screw up the way the economy allocates resources and production.

The interest rate is the price of money. Prices send signals in an economy. Think of them as street signs. In a free economy, low interest rates would come about through an abundance of savings.

And if you have a lot of savings, what does that mean?

That means that people are not consuming today. Their time preference for consumption is in the future. And so the signal that sends to the economy is, hey, you don’t need to produce a lot of stuff for today because Americans are saving. They’re not spending a lot of money. So, you can invest in these long-term projects that aren’t going to pay off for years and years and years. And so then you end up investing in those types of projects that don’t have immediate returns because you got these low interest rates that are sending the signal that Americans don’t need the money right now. They’re going to save and they’re going to spend the money in the future.”

But in today’s economy, that’s not why interest rates are low. The only reason interest rates are at zero is because the Fed is artificially suppressing them.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

History Warns The Fed Will Raise Interest Rates More, Not Less

November 3, 2021

History Warns The Fed Will Raise Interest Rates More, Not Less

History Warns The Fed Will Raise Interest Rates More, Not Less

“Currently, the December 2019 Fed Funds futures contract implies that the Fed will reduce the Fed Funds rate by nearly 75 basis points (0.75%) by the end of the year. While 75 basis points may seem aggressive, if the Fed does embark on a rate-cutting policy and history proves reliable, we should prepare ourselves for much more.”- Investors Are Grossly Underestimating the Fed

Our advice to plan for the unexpected was prescient. When we wrote the article in July 2019, Fed Funds were between 2.25% and 2.50%. The Fed Funds futures contracts were implying the Fed would reduce rates by .75% in the forthcoming months.

By April 2020, Fed Funds were trading near zero, 1.50% below where the market thought they would be in mid-2019. The article quantifies the Fed always raises or cuts rates much more than expected.

Today, the market is pricing in steady increases, starting in 2002, for the Fed Funds rate. Despite high inflation and low unemployment, the Fed refuses to even think about thinking about raising rates.

Given the Fed’s posture, it may appear traders are overestimating how much the Fed will raise rates. However, we caution once again; traders always underestimate the Fed.

Evidence

Whether higher Fed Funds seems logical is irrelevant. As investors, we need to strategize in case history proves clairvoyant. Given the Fed is starting to normalize monetary policy, it’s worth revisiting the article from 2019.

We recommend reading the article’s first section linked above for more background on Fed Funds and their futures contracts.

The graph below shows how much the Fed Funds futures market consistently over or underestimates what the Fed does. The green areas and dotted lines quantify how much the market underestimates how much the Fed ultimately reduces rates…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Revenge of the Real World

November 3, 2021

Revenge of the Real World

The status quo response would be amusing if the consequences weren’t so dire.

Rather than stare at empty shelves, you have two options for distraction: you can don a virtual-reality headset and cavort with dolphins in the metaverse, or you can trade various forms of phantom wealth that always go up (happy happy!) because the Fed.

Neither distraction actually solves any real-world problems, a reality we can call the Revenge of the Real World We’ve entered a peculiar phase in American history in which illusions of wealth and control are the favored distractions from the unraveling of the real world economy and social order.

Printing trillions of currency units can’t restore the global supply chain or social cohesion, Rather, jacking phantom wealth to the moon is only accelerating the collapse of the social order and the economy even as it accomplishes absolutely nothing in terms of solving real-world problems.

Let’s start with the core economic realities of the 21st century:

1. The number of high-consumption (“middle class”) people doubled from 1 billion to 2 billion. The human populace has expanded to 7.9 billion individuals, but poor people who don’t have enough money to consume large quantities of energy, goods and services delivered by the global supply chain don’t have much of an impact on global consumption of energy and resources. It’s the number of people jetting around the world playing their part in the landfill economy (toss the old one, buy a new one) who drive “growth” (i.e. waste is growth).

Strangely enough, there are actual physical limits to resources being transformed into junk being dumped in the landfills. Humanity’s rapacious appetite for stuff has extracted all the cheap-to-extract resources and now all that’s left are the increasingly expensive-to-extract resources.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Fed’s Inflation Is behind the Supply Chain Mess

November 1, 2021

The Fed’s Inflation Is behind the Supply Chain Mess

It seems supporters of the Biden administration finally settled on a narrative they like for explaining away supply chain shortages.

Here’s the administration’s talking point: the US economy is rolling along so well that Americans are demanding huge amounts of goods. That’s overwhelming the supply chain and causing the backups roiling America’s ports and logistic infrastructure.

For example, transportation secretary Buttigieg this month declared “Demand is up … because income is up, because the president has successfully guided this economy out of the teeth of a terrifying recession.”

Similarly, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters supply chain problems are occurring because “people have more money … their wages are up … we’ve seen an economic recovery that is underway.”

This position has been mocked by a number of conservative politicians—including Senator Ted Cruz—and commentators, who find this to be an absurd assumption. Indeed, Cruz and other critics could point to a variety of factors ranging from the weight of government regulations to the problem of covid lockdowns limiting the productivity of supply-chain workers.

Yet the administrator’s defenders are right about consumer demand and spending—even if for the wrong reasons. As Mihai Macovei showed earlier this month, the global volume of trade and shipping volume in 2021 have actually exceeded prepandemic numbers. For example, in the port of Los Angeles, “loaded imports” and “total imports” for the 2020–21 fiscal year (ending June 30, 2021) were both up when compared to the same period of the 2018–19 fiscal year.

In other words, it’s not as if little is moving through these ports. In fact, more is moving through them than ever before. That suggests demand is indeed higher.

But why is it higher? It some ways, it’s true that, as Psaki says, “people have more money.” That, however, is where the veracity and usefulness of Biden’s defenders end in explaining the problem.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What is the Federal Reserve Hiding From Us?

October 28, 2021

What is the Federal Reserve Hiding From Us?

“The most inappropriate monetary policy that I’ve seen maybe in my lifetime.”- Paul Tudor Jones on the Federal Reserve via CNBC

The Federal Reserve has three mandates per their Congressional charter. They are to effectively promote maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates. The Fed has met the first goal, employment is largely maximized. As far as the other two, the Fed is running monetary policy consistent with destabilizing prices and doing it with interest rates that are well below moderate.

Why are they employing the “most inappropriate monetary policy” that famed investor Paul Tudor Jones has seen in his lifetime? Maybe the better question is, is such an aggressive policy, which purposely goes against their mandate, hiding something?

Fed Mandate Scorecard

To provide context to the questions, let’s review the three Fed mandates and compare their current standing to the past.

Federal Reserve, What is the Federal Reserve Hiding From Us?

Maximum Employment

The unemployment rate is slightly above the average of the five years leading to the pandemic but over 1% below the longer-term average. The two alternative employment measures, which factor in job openings and those willingly quitting jobs, show the adjusted unemployment rate is well below the 20-year average.

Traditional measures of employment are essentially fully recovered from the pandemic. Alternative measures, such as those above, tell us the labor market is healthier than almost any time in the last 20 years.

Stable Prices

Inflation measured by CPI and the Fed’s preferred method, PCE, runs two to three times the rate of the last five and twenty years. Five-year market-implied inflation expectations are up to 2.90%, about twice that of the previous ten years. Consumer inflation expectations, measured by the University of Michigan, are nearing 5%, also twice that of the last ten years.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Doing 90 MPH on Deadman’s Curve: A Few Thoughts on Risk

October 26, 2021

Doing 90 MPH on Deadman’s Curve: A Few Thoughts on Risk

When the wreck is recovered, witnesses will wonder why they took such heedless, foolish risks.

You’re in the back seat wedged between tipsy revelers, the driver is drunk and heading into Deadman’s Curve at 90 miles per hour. Nobody’s worried because the driver has never crashed. Before they slid into euphoric incoherence, the other passengers answered your doubts with statistics and pretty charts showing that the driver had never had an accident, so there was nothing to worry about.

They also said that the driver’s Uncle Fed had rigged the vehicle with an anti-accident device, so a crash was impossible. One passenger blurted out that a fellow named Goldy Sacks said the driver could easily “melt up” and take Deadman’s Curve at 120 miles per hour without any trouble.

You see the problem here: the risk of crashing and expiring is soaring but the giddy occupants are completely confident there’s no risk, and this confidence is the source of the danger. If you’re sure Uncle Fed’s device can protect the vehicle from any crash, then why not take Deadman’s Curve at 90 miles per hour?

And if Goldy Sacks says you could actually take it at 120 miles per hour, then taking it at 90 MPH is actually quite prudent and cautious.

This confidence inspires tremendous risk-taking that eventually ends very badly for all the revelers. The irony is rich: the greater the confidence, the greater the risk, the greater the risk, the greater the odds of a crash. The greater the risks being taken, the greater the odds that the crash will be fatal to all occupants.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Nation of Imposters

October 23, 2021

A Nation of Imposters

That’s how we’ve become a nation of imposters: our imposter stock market hits a new high and the imposters cheer because it proves the scam is still working.

You’ve read the warnings about the proliferating imposter scams: scammers posing as “officials”, representatives of utilities or “a close friend of a family member” all exploit the fast-draining reservoir of trust in America to extract financial information out of the unwary marks.

I’m not sure what’s more remarkable: the depths of scammer perversity or the fact that some people can still be conned by claims of authority or friendship. Most are seniors, of course, as the elderly still retain an easy-to-scam trust in institutions and officialdom as a holdover from an era before trust was unraveled by wholesale self-serving deception.

The deeper problem is that America is now a nation of imposters. Everything that is presented as august and trustworthy is an imposter organization designed to enrich the few at the expense of the many via deception and the cloaking of self-serving skims and scams.

A useful tool to uncloaking imposters is to ask: cui bono, to whose benefit? Take the nation’s central bank, the Federal Reserve. It claims to be serving the public and the common good, but who actually benefits from its policies?

1. Insiders frontrunning the Fed’s public pronouncements to enrich themselves. Here’s looking at you, Chairperson Powell and the rest of your self-serving imposter cronies.

2. The top 0.1% who own the majority of productive assets goosed ever higher by Fed policies.

3. Billionaires.

4. The top 10% who own 89% of all stocks: The wealthiest 10% of Americans own a record 89% of all U.S. stocks

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Peter Schiff: Stock Up Now! Inflation Could Get Very Ugly

October 18, 2021

Peter Schiff: Stock Up Now! Inflation Could Get Very Ugly

The price of pretty much everything is rising precipitously. The CPI for September came in above expectations with a month-on-month increase of 0.4%. Peter Schiff appeared on Unfiltered with Dan Bongino to talk about inflation in Joe Biden’s America. Peter said you should stock up now because things could get ugly really quickly.

Bongino pointed out that while wages are rising, they aren’t rising as fast as prices. Wages have risen 4.6% while inflation has surged by 5.4% — according to government numbers. Peter said that is typically the trend.

The price of labor never keeps up with the price of stuff.”

Peter said the real problem is during and after COVID, a lot of Americans stopped working.

Unfortunately, they didn’t reduce their spending because the government made the mistake of replacing the incomes they lost with new money that the Federal Reserve was printing. So, we were making fewer things to buy, but everybody had more money to buy stuff, and so, prices just went ballistic. And they’re going to keep going up.”

Bongino pointed out that the rich have accounts and hedge mechanisms to shield themselves from the impacts of inflation. But what does an average middle-class family do to avoid the financial apocalypse of inflation coming down the pike?

Peter said, first of all, remember that inflation is a tax.

So, when the Biden administration says they’re not taxing people that make less than $400,000, they’re hitting them with this huge inflation tax.”

So, how do you avoid it?

Peter said, “Stock up now!”

Buy the things that you think you may need a year from now, two years from now. Buy it now. Especially the stuff that is nonperishable…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Viewing Inflation Through Rose-Colored Glasses

October 18, 2021

Viewing Inflation Through Rose-Colored Glasses

Once “we get the pandemic under control, the global economy comes back, these pressures will mitigate and I believe will go back to normal levels,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen stated, echoing “transitory” sentiments by Fed Chairman Jerome Powell. Powell believes supply chain bottlenecks are the main culprit for inflation. Well, the Biden Administration appointed the secretaries of Commerce, Agriculture and Transportation to create a supply chain task force to fix the influx issues.

Sameera Fazili, a deputy director of the White House National Economic Council, stated, “Our approach to supply chain resilience needs to look forward to emerging threats from cybersecurity to climate issues.” Is climate change the issue here? Is this an indication of where the government will misdirect resources once again? Fazili further displayed how out of touch the government is with the current crisis by saying inflation due to supply shortages is “kind of [a] good problem to be having,” as it indicates demand. The countless number of businesses and consumers currently paying for basic living expenses at up to 30-year highs may not see the glass half full at the moment.

Then, the Biden Administration met with the workers at the Port of Los Angeles this week, where it was agreed upon that the port would operate 24/7 to address issues. Ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach, California, account for 40% of all shipments into the US, which seems to be a good start. Even Walmart, FedEx, and UPS have agreed to unload their shipments at non-peak hours to help the process. Oh, wait, the ongoing worker shortage. Companies are begging people to apply, and it remains to be seen whether the ports will be able to maintain proper staffing to run at full capacity around the clock…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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