Precious metals news

Tax cuts and deregulation are all well and good. But without Fed reforms, monetary technocrats could stifle an American economic revival any time they want. There’s no time to lose. Aspiring Republicans must get serious about fixing the Fed.

For many, that was a crystallizing moment for the 90-year-old Federal Home Loan Bank system, which has ballooned to more than $1.5 trillion while playing a growing role as a backstop for banks taking all kinds of risks -- and a diminishing role in funding new mortgages. That’s raising questions about the purpose of FHLBs and why the private institutions enjoy so much government support. .

Two Deutsche Bank strategists just wrote a study in which they said “a default wave is imminent.” This May 31 news item from Marketwatch provides details: By the fourth quarter of 2024, they [the two Deutsche Bank strategists] say the U.S. high-yield default rate will peak at 9%, and the U.S. loan default rate will reach 11.3%. The European speculative-default rate will rise too, though to a less steep 5.8%.

The political and financial class breathed a sigh of relief when Congress passed the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023. The bill suspends the debt ceiling for two years, thus avoiding the establishment’s nightmare of a government default on its debt. Rather, it allows the government to continue adding trillions of dollars of debt that will be monetized by the Federal Reserve.

The question that came up after my detailed report on jobs by employer category was this: Why were jobs in the “retail trade” in May, at 15.55 million, still down from the peak in 2016? And why were they about level with where they’d been at the end of 2007 before the Great Recession, even as total jobs at all “establishments” have grown by about 13% since 2007 and by 8% since 2016? Turns out, jobs in the “retail trade” are on a structural decline, despite surging retail sales, in part because of the way jobs in the “retail trade” are defined.

The second, third, and fourth largest bank failures in U.S. history occurred this year. And yet, none of the banks that blew up were on the “Problem Bank List” that is prepared quarterly by the federal bank regulator that is supposed to be on top of these things – the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

I don’t completely concur with Jimbo’s idea here, but it’s an interesting way to look at it, and I absolutely agree with the conclusion. Fact is that deposits are declining dollar…

While markets have clearly given up worrying about a recession, the laundry list of indicators warning of one keeps growing. The latest example, via Real Investment Advice’s Lance Roberts, highlights the relationship between tightening bank lending standards and GDP.

Euointelligence has an interesting take on why Biden Inflation Reduction Act will fail in its goal to re-industrialize the US.

Here's a Tweet that caught my eye regarding the "fundamental problem" in China. What about the US and EU?

Banks, especially regional banks, made stupid bets regarding interest rates with deposits and a few went under as a result. There may be serious implications down the road, but for now, the Fed avoided a crisis. Yet, in some ways, this setup is worse. Stagnation will linger as recession or near-recession for a long time.

...lots of questions came up about what types of jobs had been created, whether these jobs were mostly low-paid jobs in the Leisure & Hospitality sector or wherever, and whether “multiple jobholders” inflated those strong jobs numbers. So today, we’ll get into the jobs by industry. As we’ll see in a moment, jobs in retail, and Leisure & Hospitality, and State & Local Government (mostly educators) are still below where they’d been before the pandemic.

t really should not have been a surprise - given the weakness in Manufacturing PMIs - but headline and core US factory orders disappointed in April (today's latest data). The headline factory orders rose just 0.4% MoM (half the 0.8% MoM expected) and worse still, the March data was revised form from +0.9% to +0.6% MoM.

Following the decline in Manufacturing survey data (both ISM and PMI in contraction - sub-50), both Services surveys were expected to show improvements in May.

Gold prices slipped on Monday as the dollar firmed after a strong U.S. payrolls report, overshadowing support from prospects that the Federal Reserve would pause its rate hikes this month.

Thirty people could be paid £1,600 a month without any obligation under proposals for the first trial of a universal basic income in England. Researchers from think tank Autonomy are seeking financial backing for a two-year pilot programme to see how it would change the lives of the group.

U.S. regulators are preparing to force large banks to shore up their financial footing, moves they say will help boost the resilience of the system after a spate of midsize bank failures this year.

The Federal Reserve’s June meeting is shaping up to be one of the trickiest in its 15-month campaign to tame inflation: Chair Jerome Powell seems intent on skipping an interest-rate increase, while explaining to the public that officials aren’t done yet.

Morgan Stanley strategists anticipate a sudden pullback in corporate earnings will slam the brakes on a US equity rally, a call at odds with Wall Street estimates.

The BRICS grouping of emerging market economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) now accounts for a larger share of the world’s economic output in PPP dollars than the G7 group of industrialised countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK, USA). Their respective shares of global output have fallen and risen between 1982 and 2022 from 50.4 percent and 10.7 percent, to 30.7 percent and 31.5 percent. No wonder another dozen countries are eager to join the BRICS, prompting Alec Russell to proclaim recently in The Financial Times: “This is the hour of the global south.”