Precious metals news

SEC Says Binance Misused Customer Funds, Ran Illegal Crypto Exchange in U.S. The SEC seeks to shut down Binance.

'Over the past two quarters, real GDP shows the economy expanding by 1.0% whereas GDI shows it contracting by 1.4%. The divergence is ominous: GDI previously undershot GDP dramatically during the 2007-09 financial crisis and in the early 1990s recession.'

“There are two reasons for this,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics. “One is that we’re in a world of high inflation and high interest rates and that typically ends with a recession.” “The other reason there’s been so much talk about recession is because a lot of leading economic indicators that economists rely on to predict recession are screaming ‘recession’ and that’s hard to deny.”

More than a dozen Chinese property firms face the risk of delisting from the country’s stock exchange, an event that will shut an important funding channel for the beleaguered industry.

Chinese authorities asked the nation's biggest banks to lower their deposit rates for at least the second time in less than a year in an effort to boost the economy, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. State-owned lenders including Bank of China, Industrial & Commercial Bank of China and Bank of Communications were last week advised to...

Nearly $1.5 trillion in commercial mortgages are coming due over the next three years, and many of the landlords on the hook for repayments are vulnerable to default in part because of the way their loans are structured.

The survey of 350 businesses by property consultants Knight Frank and commercial real estate firm Cresa found that 50% the largest businesses they questioned – those with more than 50,000 employees – expect to shrink their global workspaces, although most are only planning to reduce by between 10% and 20%.

Shares of U.S. banks fell on Monday with some investors pointing to worries that a flood of Treasury bill issuance following the raising of the U.S. debt ceiling would drain liquidity from lenders.

Contracts on the Nasdaq 100 edged lower, with Apple down 0.4% in premarket trading on concern the steep price of its much-anticipated mixed-reality headset will crimp shipments. European semiconductor firms slid after Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. — the main chipmaker to Apple — said capital spending will be at the lower end of its guidance range. Chevron Corp. fell 1%, while declines in Shell Plc and BP Plc weighed on Europe’s main stock benchmark after crude gave up all its gains spurred by news of Saudi Arabia’s supply cut.

Asian stocks nudged higher on Tuesday as soft U.S. economic data reinforced expectations that the Federal Reserve may skip an interest rate hike when it meets next week. Futures indicated European stocks were set for a muted open, with Eurostoxx 50 futures down 0.05%, German DAX futures off 0.06% and FTSE futures losing 0.04%. Australia's S&P/ASX 200 index lost 1%...

Gold Performance in Major Currencies, 2000-2023 YTD. Annualized Performance of Gold, in USD, if Bought on the Last Day of the Month and Held until 05/31/2023 (Holding Period ≥ 1 Year). And Much More.

Central banks have long been familiar with gold as an asset class. Through variations of historical gold standards, central banks accumulated large gold reserves initially to back their paper currencies. After the end of the Second World War, the implementation of the Bretton Woods system continued to place gold at the heart of the international monetary system. The US dollar would be pegged to gold with guaranteed convertibility at a fixed rate, while all other currencies would be pegged to the US dollar. However, skyrocketing US budget deficits in subsequent decades led to a breakdown of the Bretton Woods system until the US finally suspended the convertibility of the dollar to gold in 1971, effectively ending gold’s formal role in the international monetary system.

Given the dire levels of global debt, foreign central banks are compelled to prioritize enhancing the quality of their international reserves to support their monetary systems. In essence, these institutions function similarly to traditional businesses that require high-quality assets on their balance sheets to establish financial stability.

Although Gold has pulled back and its latest breakout attempt failed, it remains fairly close to the most significant Gold breakout in 50 years and the most significant macro breakout since the S&P 500 broke out in 2013.

Gold rebounded on Monday after weaker U.S. services sector growth reinforced bets for the Federal Reserve to stand pat on interest rates next week.

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.