Precious metals news

Charles Schwab (SCHW) on Monday said it lost $41 billion in deposits in the first three months of 2023, offering investors the first detailed look at how a firm at the center of last month’s banking crisis navigated the tumult.

Turmoil across the banking sector, sparked by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, has ignited fresh doubts among investors over the outlook for interest rates and bond yields — at a time when inflationary pressures globally remain uncomfortably high.

China injected the least amount of medium-term cash into the banking system since November, a sign that policymakers are watching the effects of past easing steps as the nation’s economic recovery appears to be on track.

The U.S. warship USS Milius sailed through the Taiwan Strait on Sunday, in what the U.S. Navy described on Monday as a "routine" transit, just days after China ended its latest war games around the island.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has met with China’s defense minister in Moscow. Sunday's meeting underscored China's strengthening engagement with Russia. China has largely aligned its foreign policy with Russia in an attempt to diminish the influence of the United States and other Western democracies. Putin and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu met with...

Along with soaring car prices, loan rates are the most expensive they’ve been in more than 15 years, with the average monthly payment on a new car at an all-time high, new data from auto website Edmunds shows.

It’s that time of year when throngs of taxpayers are buckling down to file their income tax returns before Tuesday’s filing deadline, and many often pay to use software from private companies such as Intuit and H&R Block. Almost one-quarter of Americans wait until the last minute to file their taxes. There could be a new, free option in future years. The IRS has been tasked with...

Banks in the Middle East and Central Asia have very limited exposure to last month's banking turmoil in the United States and Europe, but financial pressures are adding to strains caused by high interest rates, volatile oil prices and years of double-digit inflation, a top IMF official said on Saturday.

Small and midsize banks lost hundreds of billions of dollars in recent weeks to their bigger peers and to money-market funds offering higher yields.

Some of the largest U.S. banks singled out office commercial real estate on Friday as an area of growing concern, with property values falling and more borrowers defaulting on their loans amid rising interest rates and a slowing economy.

The underpinnings of the financial system and corporate funding are still thawing after last month’s banking crisis.

Persistent inflation will keep interest rates elevated and recession risks high, the Journal’s latest survey of economists finds.

Jamie Dimon and Larry Fink have warned investors to brace for the Federal Reserve keeping interest rates higher for a longer period of time, bucking the view that the central bank will cut rates later in 2023.

The rally in the S&P 500 has been driven by only a handful of stocks, putting the index at risk of fresh lows if bond yields rise, according to Morgan Stanley’s Michael Wilson — one of the most bearish voices on Wall Street.

The European Central Bank is set to deliver three quarter-point increases in interest rates in May, June and July before ending the most aggressive bout of monetary tightening in its history, economists polled by Bloomberg say.

Hedge funds are betting the greenback’s longest stretch of weekly declines in almost three years is about to reverse after investors ramped up pricing for Federal Reserve interest-rate cuts to extreme levels.

World stocks markets steadied near recent highs on Monday ahead of a slew of corporate earnings results this week due to reveal which economic sectors have been helped by higher rates to flourish and which have been hit.

After ending 2022 on an upward trend, China's gold market continued to rebound during the first quarter of 2023.
Wholesale gold demand in China during Q1 hit the highest first-quarter level since 2019. Meanwhile, gold imports charted the strongest start to a year since 2015.

By hiking interest rates, the Federal Reserve has pulled some of the monetary stimulus out of the economy. While the Fed hasn't done nearly enough to put the inflationary fire it lit with more than a decade of easy money, the cooling consumer price index (CPI) indicates that this has put a modest dent in price inflation — for now. But the Biden administration has opened the fiscal stimulus spigot even wider and this is mucking up the inflation fight. In fact, unless the federal government reins in spending, there is no way inflation will lose this fight.
That's not going to happen.

The massive French Pension Protests are a warning sign for the rest of the world.  Unfortunately, the Energy Cliff dynamics are making it impossible for the public and private pension systems to continue.  Watch as these types of protests spread throughout the world in the years ahead...