If the Federal Reserve ends up cutting its target federal funds rate this week, it would be an admission that the economy is in a pretty precarious state. Many analysts are trying to spin a rate cut as an attempt to keep the economic “expansion” of the past ten years going, but that’s merely wishful thinking. A decade out from the financial crisis, we can’t really say that the economy has gotten back to normal. A small group of [...]
The current stock market bull market has been fueled by the massive amounts of money pumped into world economies by central banks around the world. All that money had to go somewhere, and it has finally ended up in stock markets. To a large extent the continuing bull run is the result of stock buybacks on the part of US corporations. Those corporations have taken advantage of low interest rates to issue massive amounts of debt, then used the [...]
One of the frustrating things to those who know that a stock market crash is coming has been the recent behavior of stock markets. All signs are pointing to an economic slowdown just around the corner, yet stock markets just recently set new all-time highs. What gives? If there’s one things that markets can be characterized as right now, it’s bizarre. We’ve now seen market tops in February 2018, October 2018, and July 2019, with major swings in between. Everyone [...]
Everyone has dreams of retiring some day. For many people, that’s the motivation that keeps them coming into work every day, the knowledge that every day they’re building up more and more money in their nest egg to enable themselves to finally quit the rat race in the future. But for many potential retirees, the timing of their retirement can make a huge difference in how much money they have available to them. The 1980s and 1990s saw one of [...]
2018 was supposed to have been a great year for precious metals, but it ended up being a down year for investment assets across the board, from stocks and bonds to gold and silver. Silver was hit hard, with a 9% drop over the course of the year, slightly worse than the 5.6% drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. But 2018 is behind us now, and silver so far has been going on a tear in 2019. Silver’s performance [...]
To anyone taking a look at the US economy, the fact that the Federal Reserve is contemplating a rate cut, and the fact that markets are expecting a 50 basis point rate cut, is absolutely mind-boggling. Here we are with an economy that is supposedly booming, with employers struggling to find workers, with stock markets at all-time highs, and yet the Fed might cut rates, something that it normally does to heat up a slowing economy. What’s going on? For [...]
For centuries silver, not gold, was the precious metal of ordinary commerce. Numerous currencies, from the mark to the pound to the dollar, were defined as weights of silver. From Europe to China to the New World, silver coins were the currency of choice. Silver defined what it was to be cold, hard cash. That continuous demand over centuries hasn’t abated, as investors today trust silver just as much as gold to protect their wealth when they really need to. [...]
If you pay attention to financial media you’ve probably heard of “Rich Dad, Poor Dad.” The author, Robert Kiyosaki, has made a killing selling books and giving talks espousing his theory of investing. But while much of his focus has been on getting people to shed their concepts of how to get rich and embrace alternative methods of wealth accumulation, a lesser-known aspect of his philosophy is the belief that investing in gold and silver is one of the [...]
Despite the reams of retirement planning advice out there, there will always be some people, many through no fault of their own, who are unable to save enough money to retire comfortably. That was the impetus behind the creation of the Social Security System, to provide a backstop so that those whose retirement savings were insufficient would have an additional source of funds available to them in retirement so that they would not become indigent. Unfortunately, over the years more [...]
All investors want their retirement portfolios to perform well and make money for them, but in the back of their minds they understand that their portfolios can be subject to huge losses. That’s why many of the most successful investors over time are those who protect their portfolios from major losses, not necessarily those who make the biggest gains. One of the time-honored ways to protect investment and retirement portfolios is by investing in gold and silver. Investors have sought [...]
