Precious metals news

China's Foreign Ministry accused the United States of violating its commitment to the “One China” principle and interfering in internal Chinese affairs Thursday, after the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations committee approved a new bill that could significantly increase American defense support for the island of Taiwan.

A Bipartisan group of Congressional warmongers is pushing a multi-billion dollar military assistance package for Taiwan. The measure will include new language designating Taiwan a de-facto “major non-NATO ally.” Clearly the Ukraine model is being applied to Taiwan: fighting mainland China down to the last Taiwanese.

I’ve been addressing the war on cash lately, and for good reason. While everyone’s attention is focused on the war in Ukraine, inflation, and the Supreme Court, government plans to eliminate cash are accelerating.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has called on his Republican colleagues in Congress to block funding for what he described as “Biden’s army of IRS agents” that the GOP has warned would be used to target Americans earning less than $400,000 a year.

"The Inflation Reduction Act finally provides the funding to transform the IRS into a 21st century agency," Yellen said. "While all the improvements won’t be done overnight, taxpayers can expect to feel real differences during the next filing season."

We may easily see three or four quarters of negative GDP with relatively strong jobs because we never fully filled the losses from the pandemic. Expect a Long Period of Weak Growth, Whether or Not It's Labeled Recession. Lost in the debate over whether recession has started, is the observation that it doesn't matter much either way.

Rosenberg Research president David Rosenberg on what's next for the Fed. With CNBC's Melissa Lee and the Fast Money traders, Dan Nathan, Karen Finerman, Bonawyn Eison and Jeff Mills.

If the Fed does raise rates with a vengeance, the effects will be felt outside of its national purview: Parts of the global economy will break. The worldwide downturn will in turn blow back onto US growth. We will then be headlong into the realm of unintended consequences.

Deposits at American banks plunged by a record $370 billion in the second quarter of the year, the first decline since 2018, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

This is the sharpest turn in the housing market since the housing market crash in 2008," said Daryl Fairweather, Redfin's Chief Economist.

The economy is on the brink of a serious downturn if the Fed doesn't pump the brakes on its rate hikes, billionaire CEO Barry Sternlicht said.

n his Jackson Hole speech, Jerome Powell declared that the Fed must continue to raise interest rates and that a tighter stance is likely to come at a cost to workers and overall growth. Powell and others believe there is a tradeoff between inflation and unemployment, described by the Phillips curve. The lower the unemployment rate, the higher the inflation rate. Conversely, the...

t is becoming more likely “that it won’t be possible to wring inflation out of this economy without a proper recession and higher unemployment,” said Krishna Guha, who heads the global policy and central bank strategy team at Evercore ISI and who has been forecasting that the Fed can cool inflation without causing an outright recession.

This is the 3rd monthly drop in 4 months as utilities fell 2.3% in August (after dropping 1.2% in July). Not exactly the picture of a healthy recovering economy...

On a related note, the share of total net worth held by the bottom 50% in the US (red line) was always higher than the share of total net worth held by the top 1% (blue line) … until The Federal Reserve began QE in late 2008. Under Obama, the top 1% surpassed the bottom 50% in terms of share of total net worth. it equalized under Trump and before Covid. Then the massive QE (and surge in Federal spending) to battle Covid seemingly made the rich even richer and the bottom 50% even poorer. This is Biden’s America … massive Federal subsidies to the wealthy, crumbs for the bottom 50%.

Interest payments on the national debt are already projected to be the fastest-growing part of the federal budget in fiscal year 2022, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Payments are expected to triple from nearly $400 billion in fiscal year 2022 to a stunning $1.2 trillion in 2032 – a total of $8.1 trillion over the next decade.

With "persistently rising" debt, investors could lose confidence in the federal government's ability to pay off its debt, which could result in interest rates or inflation suddenly rising, according to the CBO.

The global inflation crisis is hitting retailers that can’t pass along higher costs to customers, putting them behind stronger rivals that still have pricing power.

When even Obama's former top economist warns that the unemployment picture will turn hellish as the Fed scrambles to crush inflation, markets are predictably looking for early warnings and turning points of this starting to happen. Alas, they won't get it in today's initial jobless claims data, which not only did not come in weaker than expected, coming solidly above expectations but the unadjusted claims print was an absolute shocker, sliding from 172K to just 156K, the lowest on record!

Once again, all these numbers need to be adjusted for inflation - which surprised to the upside in August - and that suggests demand pressures on a volume basis.