Precious metals news

Precious metals appear to be on the way to their sixth consecutive December rally. Will it continue into 2019? Here's Eric's look ahead...

"The US housing market continues to slide, as pending home sales dropped again in November, droping -0.7% M/M and crashed a whopping 7.7% compared to last year, the biggest annual drop since April 2014."

How are you weathering the great government shutdown of 2018?
We're in day seven now. It's been tough here in Lexington. I'm pretty sure I saw some kid setting up an unauthorized lemonade stand. I'm not sure we will survive the plague that's sure to follow without the FDA to put a lid on such things. 

The SchiffGold Friday Gold Wrap podcast combines a succinct summary of the week’s precious metals news coupled with thoughtful analysis. You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Lynette Zang says don't let your wealth disappear in 2019! Protect your wealth by taking the ‘flight to safety' to gold & silver. Here's Lynette to explain...

China only reports their sovereign gold holdings about every 5 years, and that number is universally viewed as fictitious. In a world where the dollar is headed toward inevitable failure, what if China already controls far more gold than the US?

"The average yield of euro-denominated junk bonds, according to the ICE BofAML Euro High Yield Index (chart), has more than doubled over the past 12 months, from the low point in November 2017 of around 2.1% on average, to 4.7% currently."

Who cares if you're breaking the law when getting caught costs so little? "Finra said Wednesday Morgan Stanley had failed to adequately detect and coordinate the supervision of certain suspicious transactions within its anti-money-laundering program for more than five years."

"Some 800,000 government workers are affected. While some of them continue to work, many will not get paid until the shutdown ends, impacting cash flows for scores of Americans."

"The employer of more than 68,000 filed for bankruptcy in October. Its last shot at survival is a $4.6 billion proposal put forward by its former CEO and chairman, Eddie Lampert."

"Burnt investors have hit the exit button. A total of 75 Chinese mutual funds with an equity focus liquidated this year, the most since 2007 when such data became available. That compared with the 88 equity mutual funds that were liquidated in total over the past 11 years."

"An inverted yield curve can potentially harm U.S. economic growth and even cause a recession by pinching bank-lending margins and causing a contraction in loan activity, according to a blog posted on Thursday by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis."

"Total debt has quadrupled since the financial crisis, and official messages of 'measures to curb indebtedness' have shown a different reality. The IMF estimates debt as a proportion of Gross Domestic Product may rise from 235% to almost 300% by 2022."

"The first step was to allow a default on the $85 billion in debt accumulated by the nation’s banks. The three largest banks in Iceland had accumulated liabilities that amounted to almost 10 times the country’s gross domestic product."

We often criticize the Federal Reserve for its three rounds of quantitative easing. Coupled with artificially low interest rates, Fed QE stimulus — essentially money creation -pumped up all kinds of asset bubbles. Now that the US central bank is trying to tighten, we're beginning to see the air seep out of those bubbles.
But when it comes to QE, the Federal Reserve has nothing on the European Central Bank. The ECB just announced the end of its QE program this month. The ECB's QE purchases totaled somewhere in the neighborhood of  2.6 trillion euros. The bank also pushed interest rates below zero. So, what did the EU get for all this stimulus? Not a whole lot.

"Torsten Slok says the U.S.’s increased debt issuance in 2018 may be driving the growing divergence between bond yields and stocks."

"I believe that everything (i.e., all reality) works like a machine, Cause-effect relationships drive what happens, and that to be effective it’s essential to have a good mental model of how those machines/realities work and to have good principles for dealing with them well."

Will people realize stocks were in a bubble all along? Will they finally notice gold & silver after this stock market decline? Here's Matt's insight...

If GATA was really perceived as "always, always" bullish on gold, it wouldn't be left out of conferences aimed at selling mining shares. Here's more...

"On the same day that the Dow benchmark put on more than 1,000 points, worldwide holdings in gold-backed ETFs swelled 20.6 tons to 2,207.8 tons, the most since June. That was the biggest percentage climb since July 2017."