03.24.23- Why the Fed Keeps Getting It Wrong
James Rickards

The market’s in a highly unstable state right now. These violent swings show the inadequacy of the standard models that the Fed and other mainstream analysts use.

The Fed assumes so many things about markets that are simply false, like that markets are always efficient, for example. They’re not. Under volatile conditions like these they gap up and down — they don’t move in rational, predictable increments like the “efficient-market hypothesis” supposes. Read More

03.23.23- The Fed Proposes A 4th Function Of Money: Means Of Social Control
Mike Shedlock

A Federal Reserve white paper has come up with a new function for money. Let's tune in...

Docket No. OP - 1670

Please consider Docket No. OP - 1670 on Interbank Settlement of Faster Payments. Read More

03.22.23- It Turns Out That Hundreds of Banks Are at Risk
Peter St. Onge

It’s the weekend, but our fresh Financial Crisis does not sleep. And a recent study says we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.

The Washington Post wrote: “If banks were suddenly forced to liquidate their bond and loan portfolios, the losses would erase up to 91 percent of their combined capital cushion.” In other words, we were already right up against the edge. Read More

03.21.23- Prepare for governments to push CBDCs in the wake of the
Silicon Valley Bank collapse
Mike Adams

Over 100 of the world’s governments are planning to push central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank may have given them the perfect opportunity to introduce this nightmarish surveillance tech.

(Article by Tom Parker republished from ReclaimTheNet.org)

The heightened fear of bank runs and the growing calls for more government controls to prevent another Silicon Valley Bank-style event has created space for governments to swoop in and present CBDCs as the solution. Read More

03.20.23- Washington's Panicked Bailout Of Bank Deposits... Here's What Comes Next
David Stockman

Why would you throw-in the towel now? We are referring to the Fed’s belated battle against inflation, which evidences few signs of having been successful.

Yet that’s what the entitled herd on Wall Street is loudly demanding. As usual, they want the stock indexes to start going back up after an extended drought and are using the purported “financial crisis” among smaller banks as the pretext. Read More

03.18.23- Silicon Valley Bank, Just
the Tip of the Iceberg
Ben Garrison

Silicon Valley Bank is yet another example of corruption in the banking sector. I’ve read that SVB is the second largest banking failure in US history.

A woke and ‘green’ bank, SVB was devoted to ‘DIE,’ or Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity.

Maybe the latter in particular contributed to their collapse, but before it did go bust executives running the sorry show made sure they cashed out of their stock and rewarded all the top executives with generous bonuses. The taxpayers will pick up the rest of the tab via FDIC insurance…  Read More

03.17.23- The Federal Reserve Is the Root Cause of the Banking Crisis
Jacob G. Hornberger

The Justice Department has announced it is investigating the banking crisis. It will undoubtedly charge that banking officials are responsible for the crisis. One thing is for sure: It will not indict the Federal Reserve System, which is the root cause of the crisis. In fact, in its search for scapegoats, it will not even acknowledge the Fed’s role in the crisis. That’s because the Fed plays a sacrosanct role in America’s welfare-warfare state, and every federal official knows that. Read More

03.16.23- The Looming Quadrillion Dollar Derivatives Tsunami
Ellen Brown

Ellen Brown’s analysis of derivatives is one of the most intelligent articles we’ve read about the financial system since banks started blowing up. She’s nailed the biggest risk. From Brown at unz.com:

On Friday, March 10, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapsed and was taken over by federal regulators. SVB was the 16th largest bank in the country and its bankruptcy was the second largest in U.S. history, following Washington Mutual in 2008. Despite its size, SVB was not a “systemically important financial institution” as defined in the Dodd-Frank Act, which requires insolvent SIFIs to “bail in” the money of their creditors to recapitalize themselves. Read More

03.15.23- How The Fed Broke The Banks
Joakim Book

The Fed's anti-inflation measures had to hurt someone...

The Federal Reserve is in the unenviable position of achieving its mandate by crashing the economy. It's not something it wants to do, as Fed Chair Jerome Powell meekly admitted in his exchange with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) last week. But it's something that happens as an unavoidable outcome of slowing down an economy littered with excess money and inflation. Broad money growth has been negative since late November, and interest rate expenses on everything from corporate borrowing to credit cards to the government's own debt have been rising fast. Read More

03.14.23- The Cover-up Begins
Paul Craig Roberts

The disinformation service, Bloomberg, takes the lead. Bloomberg points its finger at Donald Trump and “Trump era deregulation.” In Bloomberg’s rewriting of history,  Trump is responsible because he signed a bill passed by Democrats and Republicans that allowed mid-sized banks to “skirt some of the strictest post-financial crisis regulations.” So, where was the federal reserve? Where were the bank regulators? Bloomberg doesn’t say.

Presidents don’t write financial legislation. Financial legislation that the Federal Reserve and the SEC don’t approve doesn’t get passed. A third world immigrant-invader, Ro Khanna, who somehow represents in Congress Silicon Valley says: “Congress must come together to reverse the deregulation policies that were put in place under Trump.” Read More

03.13.23- We Are All Counterfeiters Now
George Ford Smith

Intellectuals and politicians often try to verbally summarize or justify conventional thinking in pithy ways. Milton Friedman (in 1965) and Richard Nixon (in 1971) both said different versions of the phrase “we are all Keynesians now.” . . . Friedman and Nixon were describing the thoughts behind the implementation of Great Society redistribution programs and an inflationary monetary policy designed to offset the cost of those programs.

—Brian Wesbury and Robert Stein Read More

03.11.23- Hard Landing Or Harder One? The Fed May Soon Need To Choose
Raghuram Rajan

In his testimony to Congress earlier this week, Federal Reserve chair Jay Powell indicated “the ultimate level of interest rates is likely to be higher than previously anticipated” and “restoring price stability will probably require that we maintain a restrictive stance for some time”. This was the tough Fed on display, and markets accordingly tanked. Yet a few weeks earlier, Powell had set the financial markets off to the races when he said, “We can now say, for the first time, the disinflationary process has started.” Read More

03.10.23- Central Bank Digital Currency Is the Endgame – Part 1
Michael Kern

Central bank digital currency (CBDC) will end human freedom. Don’t fall for the assurances of safeguards, the promises of anonymity and of data protection. They are all deceptions and diversions to obscure the malevolent intent behind the global rollout of CBDC.

Central Bank Digital Currency is the most comprehensive, far-reaching, authoritarian social control mechanism ever devised. Its “interoperability” will enable the CBDCs issued by various national central banks to be networked to form one, centralised global CBDC surveillance and control system. Read More

03.09.23- Odds Are Rising That The Fed Will Trigger The Next Bust
Thorsten Polleit

From March 17, 2022, to the end of January 2023, the US Federal Reserve (Fed) increased its federal funds rate from practically zero to 4.50–4.75 percent. The rise in lending rates came in response to skyrocketing consumer goods price inflation: US inflation rose from 2.5 percent in January 2022 to 9.1 percent in June. Notwithstanding inflation falling to 6.4 percent in January 2023, the Fed continues to signal to markets that it will continue to hike rates to bring down consumer price inflation. Read More

03.08.23- Dear Fed, 'Speak Loudly Because Your Stick Isn't That Big Anymore'
Michael Lebowitz

The big question facing the Fed is whether they should increase the Fed Funds rate by 25bps or 50bps on March 22, 2023. If Jerome Powell cared for our advice, we would tell him to take the opposite approach of President Theodore Roosevelt. Speak loudly because your stick isn’t that big anymore. Read More

03.07.23- "Increased Financial Fragility": Fed Paper Has Word Of Warning For Central Banks Indulging Markets
Ven Ram

How much of policy tightening is too much? With the major central banks around the world already having raised their benchmark rates by the most in decades, it’s natural that the question is being asked.

In fact, it seems that it was a point of discussion at the European Central Bank’s meeting last month, though such concerns were considered premature. When interest rates go from being the most accommodative they have perhaps ever been to a regime where they need to curb the worst bout of inflation in decades, central banks have to make up for lost time. Read More

03.06.23- Interest rates: The silent killer
Alasdair Macleod

Central banks were happy to suppress interest rates, even into negative territory, so long as the heavily managed consumer price inflation statistic was rising at an annualised rate of two per cent or so. But the expansion of credit during the covid pandemic changed that, with prices subsequently leaping above the two per cent target. The new price trend first became evident in mid-2020 in both producer and consumer prices. And when NATO decided to respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine a year ago by cutting off this major energy and commodity supplier from global markets, prices soared, and interest rate suppression policies backfired. Read More

03.04.23- Is the Golden Age Of 2% Inflation Over?
Peter Reagan

Despite the Fed’s best efforts thus far to raise rates and cool off inflation, I don’t expect relief any time soon.

With that in mind, let’s look into the past to see what  a longer period of inflation looks like.

The best place to start in the U.S. is to take a brief look at an extraordinarily long period of inflation that took place from the 1970s to the early 1980s. We don’t have to examine every detail, which would take hours, but this summary will suffice: Read More

03.03.23- It's Now Impossible To Keep Politics Out Of Central Banks
Michael Every

The court of public opinion

Years ago, the start of quantitative easing caused a backlash over concerns that the central banks were prioritizing the asset-rich over the average Joe. It raised questions about mandates and the independence of the monetary authority, particularly in Europe where the ECB was the only actor to prevent a fragmentation of the Eurozone. And it even raised questions of ethics, after some of the FOMC members’ trading activitiescame to light. Read More

03.02.23- The Best Speech About Money You'll Ever Hear: An Evil System vs Honest Money
Mike Maloney

View Video

03.01.23- The Forces Upending The Global Economy Cannot Be Reversed
Charles Hugh Smith

So sorry, but the lifestyle of low-cost credit and all the goodies it could buy is permanently out of stock.

In focusing on geopolitics, we lose sight of the dependence of every economy on a functioning global economy of low-cost goods, services, materials, shipping, transport, capital, labor and financial instruments, all flowing freely across borders and around the world. Read More

02.28.23- My Origin Story, The Federal Reserve, and How We Got Here
Chris Martenson

View Video

02.27.23- Kamikaze Strategies
Michael Every

Kamikaze Strategies 

It’s a bad market strategy to stick to a fundamental view while ignoring a price trend the other way: it’s a kamikaze strategy when that fundamental view doesn’t capture reality.

In 2021, inflation was not going to happen: then it rose sharply, but was called “transitory”. In 2022, inflation was not going to soar, nor rates rise: then it did, and rates rose. Read More

02.25.23- Powell's Gettysburg Moment, The USDollar's Waterloo, & Today's Open Madness
Matthew Piepenburg

Below we examine the historical interplay of losing wars, cornered egos, tanking currencies, greater controls and gold’s loyalty in times of open madness.

History Matters

Despite the fact that universities even in the Land of Lincoln have had a say in cancelling Abraham Lincoln (good grief…) for apparently not being “woke” enough circa 1861 to be as wise as the neo-liberal faculties of 2023, I’d still make a case that history matters, and by this, I mean all its wonderful and ugly nuances (and lessons), whether they offend modern sensibilities or not. Read More

02.24.23- Fed Forced to Choose Between These Two Equally Scary Possibilities
Peter Reagan

In the recent era of what feels like endless inflation, we keep hoping for something that would cool it off.

In fairness, the Federal Reserve led by Jerome Powell has been raising rates slowly after each meeting (even though they started later than they should’ve). The result of that approach has cooled inflation over the last six months, from 4.5 times over the Fed’s target 2% rate to just 3.2 times higher. Read More

02.23.23- Will 7% Mortgages Crush Housing?
John Rubino

Between 2020 and 2022 houses in America’s hottest real estate markets went from unaffordable to 50% above unaffordable. Put another way, they did what would have been impossible in an economy where market forces determined interest rates and home prices. 

But ours was not that kind of market. Central banks around the world had lost their collective minds and money was the cheapest it had ever been - far cheaper than it should or would be in a sane world. Offered 2.75% 30-year mortgages (read, shockingly low monthly payments), home buyers stampeded off the proverbial cliff en masse, paying any price, accepting any terms (no inspection, no problem!) to get houses in hot markets. Read More

02.22.23- How The Fed Messes With People's Lives (A Mortgage-Rate Perspective)
Mike Shedlock

A four-month decline in mortgage yields may be over. Let's discuss what this means to the home buyer and how the Fed has messed with people's lives over time. Read More

02.21.23- Central Banks, Recession 'Landing' Risks, & Why China Is The Issue To Watch
Bill Blain

“A great landing in one when you can fly the plane the following day..”

The market is talking about a no-landing scenario – but should be watching what Central Banks are saying, and China’s position re Ukraine. The market remains vulnerable to recession and rising geopolitical tensions. They are very closely linked. Read More

02.20.23- US Treasury 6-Month Yield Back Over 5% (Back To 2007 And The Financial Crisis As The Fed Withdraws Liquidity)
Anthony B. Sanders

Well, here we are again. Back to 2007 and the housing bubble and subsequent financial crisis. The US Treasury 6-month yield is back over 5%, a yield we haven’t seen since August 8, 2007. 

Well, there is one notable difference. The Fed’s balance sheet is still at $8.4 TRILLION whereas it was only $866 billion on August 8, 2007. Read More

02.18.23- Treasury Traders Know Fed Has Missed The Boat On A Bigger Move
Tyler Durden

On Thursday afternoon, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland President Loretta Mester remarked that she saw a compelling case for a bigger increase earlier this month when policymakers met. Not much later in the day, her colleague James Bullard commented that he would not rule out supporting a 50-basis point hike at the March meeting. Read More

02.17.23- The Great Gold Rush: Central Banks in Frenzy
Alex Gloy

Central banks have been buying gold in quantities not seen since 1967. After decades of efforts to demonetize gold, why would the guardians of the monetary system suddenly invest large sums into a metal that demands crippling mining costs and offers little return? The answer is not so simple. Read More

02.16.23- Fed Raising Its Inflation Target and Other Shenanigans
Doug Casey

International Man: Recently, there have been whispers about the Fed raising its official inflation target above 2%.

But before we get into that, we should define our terms.

What is the proper way to think of inflation and the Fed itself? Read More

02.15.23- "Higher Inflation. Higher Protectionism. Higher Global Tensions...
For Longer"
Michael Every

When most of the market was saying “transitory!” this Daily was among the first to float the idea that inflation and rates risked being “higher for longer”. This was considered a ‘colorful’, counter-consensus view: like Russia invading Ukraine; or a US-China Cold War in 2017; or Trump winning the 2016 election. Yet Valentine’s Day saw a slew of Fed speakers say higher for longer in so many words; and the market --finally-- shifted its rate projections up to the most dovish end of the Fed’s dot plot, at least until 2024, while starting to price in the odds of rates rising in June rather than being close to the start of a series of falls. Read More

02.14.23- Bond Market a Tad Antsy about Inflation Not Just Vanishing? One-Year Yield Nears 5%. Mortgage Rates Back at 6.5%
Wolf Richter

“The equity market is refusing to accept this reality”: Morgan Stanley.

Since the close on February 2, which was the day after Powell had once again spoken about stubborn inflation in services and higher rates for longer, the one-year Treasury yield has jumped by 31 basis points as of this morning, to 4.95%, the highest since July 2007, and closing in on the magic 5% that seemed like a ridiculous pipedream – or nightmare, depending on where they stood – a year ago.Read More

02.13.23- Unidentified Flying Inflation
Michael Every

A Chinese balloon was shot down over the US early last week. An unidentified flying object was shot down on Friday over Alaska; another over Canada on Saturday; Montana airspace was briefly closed on Sunday for related reasons; and yet another unidentified flying object was shot down during the Super Bowl. You want “we are not alone” speculation, you got it: CNN reports the US fighter pilots who shot down one of the objects could not identify any propulsion, and that it was just staying in the air at around 40,000 feet. So, a balloon(?): which can actually be effective war weapons according to some experts. You want Sputnik Cold War national security paranoia, you got it too. The alleged origin of these and other balloons, China, is about to shoot down a flying object over itsterritorial waters. Read More

02.11.23- The Final Chapter of Slavery Hinges on Widespread Implementation
of Central Bank Digital Currencies
Gary D. Barnett

“We don’t know, for example, who’s using a $100 bill today and we don’t know who’s using a $1000 peso bill today. The key difference with the CBCD the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability, and also we will have the technology to enforce that.” 

- Agustín Carstens–General Manager, Bank for International Settlements Read More

02.10.23- The Yield Curve Would Invert By A Record 450bps If The Fed Hikes To 8%
Michael Every

Duh, Kapital

Balloons blow, and capital won’t flow. ‘US Makes Case That Chinese Balloon was Part of a Spying Program’, says Bloomberg, and “The Chinese spy balloon shot down Saturday included western components with English-language writing on them.” ‘US Aims to Curtail Financial Ties With China’, says the New York Times, with the White House preparing rules to restrict US dollars from flowing there. An inverse CFIUS would stop US investment in areas related to technologies like AI; or with dual civilian-military uses, which is a longer list; or balloons. Read More

02.09.23- Two Bears...
And Nowhere Near Enough Cocaine
Michael Every

Cocaine Bear

I get quite a lot of direct and indirect feedback to the Global Daily. Some of it is positive, some of it is negative - and a lot of that is downright unpleasant, and some of it is ‘eclectic’ - like a detailed analysis of the collapse of the economy of Atlantis. However, yesterday was the first time I was told I was “on cocaine” for arguing higher rates can, in some circumstances, lead to higher inflation. (For more on which, see here.) Read More

02.08.23- Central Bank Gold Reserves Chart Second-Highest Increase Since 1950 In 2022
Peter Schiff

Central banks closed out 2022 with reported net purchases of 28 tons of gold in December. Including large unreported purchases, this brought total central bank gold buying in 2022 to 1,136 tons. It was the second-highest level of net purchases on record dating back to 1950, and the 13th straight year of net central bank gold purchases.

China officially started buying gold again in November and made another large purchase of 30 tons in December. That raised China’s total gold reserves to over 2,000 tons for the first time. Read More

02.07.23- Fed Loan Officers Paints Dire Picture: Loan Standards Approaching Record Tightness As Loan Demand Plummets
Tyler Durden

Late last week, when looking at the most recent Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey held by the Fed, we noted that the surge in revolving credit has not gone unnoticed by lenders: the on bank lending practices showed banks tightening lending standards for commercial, mortgage, and credit card loans.

As Bloomberg's Vincent Cignarella observed, "tighter credit likely will drive slower spending, a reduction in risk and the potential for the Fed to pivot sooner rather than later to avoid or shorten a potential recession. That would be more good news for bond bulls." Read More

02.06.23- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: The Looming Emergence of Regional Reserve Currencies
Joseph P. Farrell

For some time, I’ve been predicting the emergence of a “multi-reserve currency” world, a bit of a paradigm shift that the world has not really ever experienced as a permanent feature of its financial system for a very long time, centuries probably.  To be sure, there were periods of exception to this coming paradigm shift, as when during a brief period between the World Wars both the British pound sterling and the US dollar both served as reserve currencies. But the period was more of an interlude period of the transition from the British pound  to the American dollar. What I’m talking about is a world were multiple reserve currencies coexist as a relatively stable feature of the financial system for a prolonged period of time. Read More

02.04.23- COVID Stimulus Spending Played 'Sizable Role' in Inflation
Eric Boehm

Fiscal stimulus during the pandemic contributed to an increase in inflation of about 2.6 percentage points.

Stimulus spending played a "sizable role" in driving inflation to 40-year highs in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Read More

02.03.23- Fed’s Balance Sheet Drops by $532 Billion from Peak, Cumulative Loss Reaches $27 billion: February Update on QT
Wolf Richter

QT is starting to make a visible dent.

The Federal Reserve has shed $532 billion in assets since the peak in April, with total assets falling to $8.43 trillion, the lowest since September 2021, according to the weekly balance sheet released today. Compared to the balance sheet a month ago (released January 5), total assets dropped by $74 billion.

Quantitative Tightening is starting to make a visible dent: Read More

02.02.23- Warning Shot Fired!
James Rickards

Another warning shot across the bow just happened…

I warned my readers a few weeks ago about how the Federal Reserve, in cooperation with giant global banks, has launched a 12-week pilot project to test the message systems and payment processes on the new CBDC dollar.

A pilot project is not research and development. That’s already done. The pilot means that what I call “Biden Bucks” are here, and the backers just want to test the plumbing before they roll the system out on the entire population. Read More

02.01.23- "Disneyland Is Over" For 'Mickey Mouse' Investors: The Fed Still Has 'The Mother Of All Bombs' To Drop
Michael Every

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” 

– Karl Rove Read More

01.31.23- The Federal Reserve Is
Nowhere Near Victory
Peter Schiff

The mainstream is optimistic about both the economy and the Fed’s fight against inflation. In his podcast, Peter Schiff took apart the mainstream narrative, explaining that the economy is much weaker than most people realize and the Fed is nowhere near victory in the war on inflation.

We’re seeing a Santa Claus rally in stock in January, especially in the speculative momentum stocks. We’ve also seen a rally in the bond market. Peter called it a dead cat bounce. Read More

01.30.23- Fed's words in focus as markets bet rate hikes will soon end
Ann Saphir

Jan 30 (Reuters) - U.S. central bankers have unambiguously telegraphed this week's policy decision: a quarter-of-a-percentage-point increase in their benchmark interest rate, the smallest since they kicked off their tightening cycle 10 months ago with one the same size.

Less clear is whether they will continue to signal "ongoing increases" ahead for the policy rate as evidence mounts that inflation and the economy are both losing momentum. Read More

01.28.23- Weekend Rant:
The Slippery Slope to Tyranny
Jan Markell

The world is groaning in every category, and it lacks a leader. Biden, Macron, Trudeau, et al, have all demonstrated behavior that resembles the Keystone Kops. So what’s ahead?

I hear from a lot of people! Here are some of the scenarios they see playing out in the near term. They can’t all be right, but here’s a brief run-down of what many suggest is ahead of us. You may disagree with one or all points, but millions of people believe one of the following scenarios will play out. Read More

01.27.23- The Biggest Collapse in M2 Money Supply Since the Great Depression
Mike "Mish" Shedlock

If your measure of inflation is money supply, then the economy is in a deflationary period right now.

M1 and M2 numbers are from the Fed, ODL is a derivative of M2, described below. 

Data for the above chart is from the Fed's H.6 Money Stock Report, released January 24. Read More

01.26.23- A Dollar Collapse Is Now in Motion – Saudi Arabia Signals the End of Petro Status
Brandon Smith

The decline of a currency’s world reserve status is often a long process rife with denials. There are numerous economic “experts” out there that have been dismissing any and all warnings of dollar collapse for years. They just don’t get it, or they don’t want to get it. The idea that the US currency could ever be dethroned as the defacto global trade mechanism is impossible in their minds. Read More

01.25.23- Gold’s Breakout: It’s Not the Inflation
James Rickards

Most assets have a poor record over the past year. Gold is one of the few assets that posted a gain — not a major gain, but a gain.

Gold has really taken off since late October, from below $1,630 to almost $1,930 today. That’s a major move. What’s going on?

You might want to argue that it has to do with inflation. The trouble with that argument is that (official) inflation has been coming down for the past few months. Meanwhile, gold seemed to massively underperform with respect to the very serious inflation we saw earlier last year. Read More

01.24.23- What does this look like 10 years from now?
Simon Black

On March 2, 1629, after years of escalating tensions with his own government, King Charles I of England dissolved parliament and ordered all the politicians to go home.

He was only in the fourth year of his reign, but Charles was already a very unpopular king. One of his worst habits was frequently abusing his power and taking unilateral executive actions– raising taxes or passing new regulations– which would ordinarily require the approval of parliament. Read More

01.23.23- CBDC and the Fed's Plan to Weaponize Money
John Titus

View Video

01.21.23- The Secret Reason Governments Love Inflation
Peter Reagan

When people spend beyond their means, they increase the likelihood that they will suffer severe financial consequences – including foreclosure and bankruptcy.

But when the U.S. government spends beyond its income, that doesn’t happen. It’s a mistake to think about government spending the way we think about our own household spending. The primary difference is a concept known by economists as modern monetary theory (MMT): Read More

01.20.23- The Modern State Cannot Exist without Fiat Money
Matt Ray

The emergence of money is a market phenomenon. By surrendering fewer marketable goods for more marketable goods, individuals move closer to the goods they ultimately wish to consume but cannot acquire through direct exchange. The most marketable goods become common media of exchange (i.e., money).

With money on one side of every transaction, the number of relevant prices is reduced, the division of labor expands, and specialization in the stages of production becomes possible. The basic function of money, then, is to facilitate exchange. Contrary to this purpose, the substitution of national paper currencies for commodity money has made trade more difficult. Read More

01.19.23- Fed Announcement Has Unexpected Effect on Gold Demand
Peter Reagan

This week, Your News to Know rounds up the latest top stories involving gold and the overall economy. Stories include: Is gold really underperforming?, more woes from COMEX and Austrian Mint discusses recent supply strains.

No Fed U-turn means gold will disappoint… right?

Last week’s gold news was, for the most part, how the Federal Reserve didn’t U-turn. It’s sticking to its hawkish monetary-tightening policy with general expectations that it will continue to do so. The subsequent headlines are surprising. Read More 

01.18.23- The Fed Is a Purely Political Institution, and It's Definitely Not a Bank.
Ryan McMaken

Those who know Wall Street lore sometimes recall that Fed chairman William Miller—Paul Volcker’s immediate predecessor—joked that most Americans believed the Federal Reserve was either an Indian reservation, a wildlife preserve, or a brand of whiskey. The Fed, of course, is none of those things, but there’s also one other thing the Federal Reserve is not: an actual bank. It is simply a government agency that does bank-like things. Read More 

01.17.23- Powell Answering Questions
No One Asked
Robert Aro

The average price of eggs increased by 49%, butter/margarine by 34% year-over-year, CNBC reported as of November. Yet, with his first speech of the year, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell addressed the issue of the Fed’s independence. Yes, the conference was on Central Bank independence. But how many Americans have any concern, or the slightest care for this?

At a conference in Sweden, Powell made his case using an appeal to democracy:

With independence comes the responsibility to provide the transparency that enables effective oversight by Congress, which, in turn, supports the Fed's democratic legitimacy.  Read More 

01.16.23- "Survive, Then Thrive": One River Digital On The Future Of Ethereum
Sebatsian Bea

It was all about the Fed – or was it? US policy rates rocketed higher last year, dominating broader market dynamics. That’s all you needed to know. But there were quiet outliers. Turkey was the top-performing equity market in US dollar terms – a surprise given the unexpectedly rapid Fed tightening. Stablecoin being stable in both price and assets was probably not on your bingo card under the digital-1929-crash column. Read More 

01.14.23- Weekend Rant: Will You Beat Uncle Sam’s Relentless Pursuit of Your Wealth?
MN Gordon

The United States is lurching towards an epic financial catastrophe.  This isn’t a novel insight.  The great tragedy has been in the works for decades.  Anyone with a mild inkling of curiosity knows what’s going on.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s population clock, the U.S. population is over 334 million.  This, no doubt, is a lot of mouths to feed and people to clothe and shelter.  But that’s not all. Read More

01.13.23- The Great Depression's Patsy
George Ford Smith

The culprit responsible for the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the Great Depression can be easily identified—the government.

To protect fractional reserve banking and generate a buyer for its debt, the US government created the Federal Reserve System in 1913 and put it in charge of the money supply. From July 1921 to July 1929, the Federal Reserve inflated the money supply by 62 percent, resulting in the crash in late October. The US government, following an aggressive “do something” program for the first time in American history, intervened in numerous ways throughout the 1930s—first under Herbert Hoover, then more heavily under Franklin D. Roosevelt. Read More

01.12.23- Schiff: Is "Cooling" CPI Setting The Stage For More Inflation?
Michael Maharrey

Based on the headline numbers, price inflation cooled again in December, boosting market optimism that the Federal Reserve will continue to ease off the pedal on its monetary tightening. But this could be setting the stage for more price inflation down the road.

And a deeper look at the data reveals that a lot of inflationary pressure remains despite the optimistic headlines. Read More

01.11.23- What if the "Black Swan" of 2023 Is the Fed Succeeds?
Charles Hugh Smith

If the Fed succeeding is a "Black Swan," bring it on. 

What if the "Black Swan" of 2023 is the Federal Reserve succeeds? Two stipulations here: 

1. "Black Swan" is in quotes because the common usage has widened to include events that don't match Nassim Taleb's original criteria / definition of black swan; the term now includes events considered unlikely or that are off the radar screens of both the media and the alt-media. Read More

01.10.23- Here's The Truth About
the "Strong US Dollar"
Ron Paul

Before we get started this week, I want to show you a chart:

Now, if this chart showed the stock price of a company, would you want to invest in it?

If it’s the price of a commodity, would you be a buyer? Read More

01.09.23- Has the Federal Reserve
Lost Its Mind?
Matt McCall

View Video

01.07.23- How FedGov Destroyed
the Housing Market
Jeff Deist and Alex J. Pollock

There is no real housing market in the US. Instead, an unholy trinity of Fannie/Freddie, the US Treasury, and the Federal Reserve Bank operate to distort the market at every turn and drive home prices up dramatically. Mises Institute Senior Fellow Alex Pollock, an economist and former mortgage banker, joins Jeff to describe the reality few Americans know. Read More

01.06.23- Why the Threat of Deflation is Real
Elliott Wave International

I know — inflation has been grabbing all the headlines for a good while now — so you may wonder why the subject of deflation is relevant.

First, the definitions of inflation and deflation go beyond commonly accepted meanings.

As Robert Prechter’s Last Chance to Conquer the Crash says:

Inflation is an increase in the total amount of money and credit, and deflation is a decrease in the total amount of money and credit. … Read More

01.05.23- Central Banks Finally Own Up to the Crisis They Created
Brandon Smith

As the Federal Reserve continues its fastest rate hike cycle since the stagflation crisis of 1980, a couple vital questions linger in the minds of economists everywhere:

When is recession going to strike?

When will the Fed reverse course on tightening?  Read More

01.04.23- Is There A Way To Stop Inflation Without Crushing The Economy
And Killing The Dollar?
Brandon Smith

One of the most dishonest games being played in economics today is the attempt by various groups (political and financial) to deflect blame for the rise of inflation. The Biden White House and Democrats desperately want to blame Russia and the war in Ukraine, even though inflation was spiking long before the war ever started. The Federal Reserve pretended for years that inflation was not a threat at all despite numerous alternative economists warning what would happen. Read More

01.03.23- The Fed needs to jack rates up
by 10% right now
Robin Wigglesworth

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying a batch of Starlink satellites as it launches from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Dec 28, 2022.

This is nuts, we thought there was a crash?

01.02.23- Is QE returning by stealth?
Michael Howell

While the Fed is reducing its bond-buying programme, it is still providing stimulus via other means

It has been a bleak year for many investors. Global investors have lost $23tn of wealth in housing and financial assets so far in 2022, according to my estimates. That is equivalent to 22 per cent of global gross domestic product and uncomfortably exceeds the lesser $18tn of losses suffered in the 2008 financial crisis. Read More