Venezuelan President Hugh Chavez has announced that he’s nationalizing the country’s gold industry. He also announced that he’s bringing Venezuelan gold reserves held in the American and European banks to Venezuela.
There’s no doubt as to why Chavez is bringing the gold reserves to Venezuela: He fears that the U.S. government will do to Venezuela what it’s been doing to Middle East dictatorships with the imposition of sanctions — seizing their money and refusing to send it to the... (more)
"The interesting thing about today is that I had intended to write this piece on Warren Buffett all week. It was just really fortuitous timing that this Bank of America news came out today. Gosh where to start. First of all, this $5 billion preferred investment by Uncle Warren in preferred stock is extremely bearish for the market, the economy and the financial system. This is not an investment, it is political-economic strategy. It tell us so many things that we probably already suspected. It t... (more)
Ever since Ben Bernanke began his massive infusions of money into the financial system, many analysts (including me) have been worried about the severe weakening of the dollar if and when the fractional-reserve-banking system magnified the initial injections severalfold.
Although the trend could reverse, data from the past two months suggest that the inflationary big one may be upon us.
Marc Faber was on Bloomberg TV dispensing his traditional sarcastic and sardonic wit in copious quantities. Among the traditional topics touched upon are stocks and specifically trading ranges, "I think a lot of people will say the markets formed a double low and we have some technical indicators that are going to turn positive, so we could rally around 1,250, but as I said before, for me, we reached a high on May 2, 2011. 1,370 on the S&P--that we will not go through", on Operation Twist par... (more)
Barron's Magazine ran a hit piece on Ron Paul where they looked at his portfolio and only showed the returns for his stocks over 1 yr and 3 yrs. Peter Schiff shows how if you go back 7-10 years, the time for which Ron Paul actually held the stocks, many of his stocks are up %2000, and the worst of them is up %200. He says how Ron's portfolio goes against all traditio... (more)
The government will run another $1.3 trillion deficit in fiscal year 2011, Congress‘ chief scorekeeper said Wednesday — easily eclipsing the $917 billion in savings over the next decade lawmakers scratched out earlier this month in their debt deal, and underscoring the deep challenge they face going forward.
It marks the third-largest shortfall in history, and the third straight $1 trillion deficit under President Obama, though next year’s deficit is projected to dip just under th... (more)
Many people say gold is a bubble about to burst, but is that really the case? One of the problems with identifying bubbles is that one is not certain one exists until it has already begun to burst. I do not think that is the case with gold today, at least not yet.
1.) The average American is selling gold, not buying, because they need the money and believe the mainstream press, which keeps telling them prices will collapse soon because they are too high. In the la... (more)
After going up $300/oz in 30 days, gold just lost $200 of it's recent run up in two days. Kitco's servers have apparently crashed from all the traffic, their charts are way behind.
I inadvertently badly scared my stepson when, as a little boy, he asked me if I had ever broken the law and I responded that there are so many laws that I was sure I broke one every day. Since 9/11, of course, this “overcriminalization of American life” has only exploded, and I am even more certain that if the government decided I would be better out of the way, they would have no problem convicting me of some spurious crime.
For thousands of people each year, the government doesn... (more)
The world of high finance was still in full flight in February 2007. The cracks in the mortgage market had not yet begun to show and Stephen Schwarzman's Blackstone Group had just completed its $39 billion purchase of Equity Office Properties in what was the largest leveraged buyout ever.
There was plenty to celebrate, so Schwarzman threw himself a party for his 60th birthday, a 3 million dollar affair for 350 of the billionaire's closest friends, including Barbara Walters, CN... (more)
Following Barack Obama’s vow to “bankrupt” the coal power industry, Americans are set to be hit with a wave of utility bill hikes as draconian EPA regulations drive up the cost of energy while General Electric, one of Obama’s biggest campaign donors, gets a waiver and is completely exempt.
New EPA rules dictate that utility companies will be forced to spend an initial outlay of $800 million dollars to conform with the regulations that mandate “harmful” emissions be reduced under t... (more)
Did you ever have the feeling that we've been through this before?
Think of it. Those in charge have only recently sworn — yet again! — that if we keep interest rates at zero, keep battling the symptoms of recession and unemployment with spending and jobs programs, clobber the speculators with regulations, and otherwise keep trying to revive moribund industries, all will be well. Just don't cut government spending or let interest rates rise!
Citigroup Inc. (C) and Bank of America Corp. (BAC) were the reigning champions of finance in 2006 as home prices peaked, leading the 10 biggest U.S. banks and brokerage firms to their best year ever with $104 billion of profits.
By 2008, the housing market’s collapse forced those companies to take more than six times as much, $669 billion, in emergency loans from the U.S. Federal Reserve. The loans dwarfed the $160 billion in public bailouts the top 10 got from the U.S. Treasury, ... (more)
Paul Krugman of Princeton University has come up with the ultimate solution to our fiscal problems: Space Aliens.
It's very hard to get inflation in a depressed economy. But if you had a program of government spending plus an expansionary policy by the Fed, you could get that. So, if you think about using all of these things together, you could accomplish, you know, a great deal. If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive b
It’s funny to see liberals harkening back to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal as a model for how the federal government should deal with the nation’s current economic woes. Liberals just don’t get it: It’s because of the socialist revolution wrought by FDR’s New Deal that America is suffering its current economic distress.
A recent example of New Deal nostalgia is an op-ed in the August 12 issue of the Washington Post entitled, “Imagining a World Without the New Deal” ... (more)
In the United States today, we are being taxed into oblivion, yet it is being done so stealthily that most Americans don't even realize what is happening. Most people are fixated on federal income tax rates, but the federal income tax is only one of the dozens of different taxes that each of us pay each year. The politicians have learned that people get really upset when income tax rates are raised, so they have found hundreds of other ways to raise taxes on us. What most taxpayers in the Uni... (more)
Rattled investors pulled more than $US40 billion ($38.29 billion) from mutual funds in a single week this month as fears about the global economy intensified.
The total of $US40.3 billion ($38.58 billion) was the biggest amount removed from mutual funds in a week in nearly three years, the Investment Company Institute said Wednesday.
Stock fund outflows alone were a net $US30 billion ($28.72 billion) for the week ended Aug. 10.That was more than the total for the pr... (more)
The first (of many) 21st century expropriations of the only true money begins today, after Hugo Chavez just announced that he will "nationalize the gold industry, including extraction and processing, and use its output to boost the country's international reserves." And who can blame him: he is merely doing what FDR did so well back in 1933 with executive order 6102. Our only advice is that he should wait before he sells: with the only option for the central planners now that we... (more)
So let me get this straight. After the most socialistic century in history, during which all industrialized nations finally found themselves gravitating toward a mixed economy model, we see a somewhat significant financial collapse of international significance and then another stock market drop a few years later, and it supposedly tells us that capitalism is “doomed.”
Nouriel Roubini says so in a new column at Slate, which goes so far as to argue that
