* It's another week where the dollar remained relatively firmly bid; the dollar index closing just above 98 * Gold prices seem to have a lid on them; they closed down today about $7 * Gold's not really going down, but it's not really going up, either * What are going up are bond yields, long-term bond yields are rising today to about a 4-month high * 30-year Treasury yield to about 2.5% * The 10-year just below 1.8 * This despite the fact that the economic news, during the week, on balance, was ...
Oct 15, 2016•40 min
* The most highly anticipated presidential debate in history is over and to me, the anticipation was more like a highly-promoted professional boxing match * Right away, as soon as the debate was over, CNN comes out with its poll, showing Clinton badly beating Donald Trump * And I thought that, if this were like a prize fight, the ref's would have stopped the fight in the first 20 minutes * That's how badly Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in this debate * And then you see this poll coming out s...
Oct 10, 2016•49 min
* This morning the government released the most important, the most highly-anticipated economic release of the month * At least that's what everybody who trades in just about any market believes * And that is the Non-Farm Payroll Report; the official scorecard on job creation and unemployment * This time it was for the month of September, the final month of Q3 * We're still waiting for the GDP estimate for Q3 * By the way the Atlanta Fed, which continues to do the interest rate limbo, lowered th...
Oct 08, 2016•32 min
* This is my 200th podcast and I looked back to the date of the first one and it was just over 2 years ago, September 2014 * I began this podcast shortly after I ended the Peter Schiff Radio Show * I hope everybody is enjoying these podcasts and if you like what you're listening to, help turn on other people to the same information * Statements early this morning by Richmond Fed President Jeffrey Lacker certainly sent tremors through the precious metals markets * Gold tumbled over $40/oz; closin...
Oct 05, 2016•35 min
* It looks like the U.S. stock market is going to close out the 3rd quarter on a positive note * The catalyst for the rally today is the big rally in Deutsche Bank; shares are up better than 14% * They were in danger of going below $10 yesterday * There were nervous about maintaining accounts with Deutsche Bank * People were re-living memories of Lehman Brothers all over again * I think the Obama Administration was beginning to get concerned * The Dow was off about 200 points on the close yester...
Sep 30, 2016•32 min
* I'm going to use today's podcast to offer my take on last night's Presidential Debates * Which certainly did not live up to all of the hype and expectation * But the airwaves today are filled with opinion makers proclaiming that Trump won or Hillary won * And of course, all of the people who think Trump won, these are the Trump supporters, Republicans - their guy won * And Hillary supporters are proclaiming that Hillary won * I'm going to give you a different take because, clearly, (and if you...
Sep 27, 2016•35 min
* Aliens didn't invade the Earth, and the Federal Reserve didn't raise interest rates * If you remember, I was pegging the probability of each at roughly the same * True to form, the Federal Reserve did pretty much exactly what I thought they were going to do and not raise interest rates * Now I thought they might have tried to lower expectations for the probability in the markets of a December rate hike * Even though they didn't say that, that was the effect of their announcement * If you look ...
Sep 21, 2016•27 min
* This morning the Federal Open Market Committee began its 2-day meeting, where they're supposedly going to discuss raising interest rates for the second time * We're going to get the official announcement of their decision on Wednesday * Most likely there will be no surprise, that they won't raise interest rates * But it will be the statement at the press conference that follows; that's typically where you can get more market-moving insights * I said they're supposedly going to be discussing wh...
Sep 21, 2016•39 min
* We got a lot of economic data released today, most of it bad, and most of it worse than expected * What I did not expect was that the market shrugged it off * Initially, there was a little reaction; gold jumped $3 but it never gained momentum and it rolled over to -$10 at the time of this recording * The dollar index, which had moved into negative territory immediately following the release, quickly recovered back to positive territory * It's still early in the day, as I'm recording, so this c...
Sep 15, 2016•28 min
* Today was a day of damage control for the Federal Reserve * It almost seems like whenever they discuss the possibility of a rate hike, they're really launching a trial balloon * They want to gauge the possibility of a rate hike and then if the market kind of shrugs it off, or blesses the rate hike the way it did last year nearing December, if the market seems it's OK with a rate hike, then maybe they'd consider actually implementing one * But before they do it, they want to test the waters, th...
Sep 13, 2016•26 min
* We had widespread selling in the markets today; it was real carnage across the board * Everything went down except the U.S. dollar * The Dow Jones was down 394 points - about 2% * That wasn't bad compared to what happened in other indices and other sectors * In fact, when it comes to the Dow Jones averages, the utilities were the weakest, they were down 3.7% * The NASDAQ was down 2-1/2%; the composite down 133 points * Various sectors were hit very hard; particularly the interest rate sensitiv...
Sep 10, 2016•33 min
* Last week on Thursday we got that much weaker than expected ISM Manufacturing number, which didn't get a lot of attention because it came out a day before the jobs number which cast a pretty big shadow on all the economic data * The number came in very weak, as I pointed out, it was 49.4, which is contraction mode * Anything below 50 in the ISM numbers indicates a contraction and a recession * But of course, no one cares about manufacturing because it is such a small part of the U.S. economy, ...
Sep 07, 2016•39 min
* On Friday we got the Non-Farm Payroll report and, of course, this jobs report is the most important ever * Because it was going to determine whether the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates at its September meeting * Of course, I didn't think the Fed would raise interest rates in September regardless of what this jobs number was * It's just that so many people were convinced that it was going to happen just because several Fed officials said it was possible Our Sponsors: * Check out DBJo...
Sep 03, 2016•32 min
* On Friday we got the Non-Farm Payroll report and, of course, this jobs report is the most important ever * Because it was going to determine whether the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates at its September meeting * Of course, I didn't think the Fed would raise interest rates in September regardless of what this jobs number was * It's just that so many people were convinced that it was going to happen just because several Fed officials said it was possible Our Sponsors: * Check out DBJo...
Sep 03, 2016•32 min
* The price of gold continues to retreat * Gold was down about $12 today; it closed around $1310 * The dollar index up again as more and more people begin to contemplate the possibility of a rate hike in either September or December * Or maybe even both, because the odds of a rate hike, either in September or December have now increased to about even money * If you go back to June, the odds were practically zero * What has changed in the last couple of months? * The only thing that has really ha...
Aug 31, 2016•44 min
* Earlier today Janet Yellen delivered her much-anticipated and way over-hyped speech at the annual Jackson Hole Symposium * It wasn't as irrelevant as I thought it was going to be, but the actual relevant part of the speech was lost on just about everybody * Instead they keep focusing on whether or not the Fed is going to raise rates by another .25 in September or December or maybe both * In reality, whether they do or do not is irrelevant, given the nature of where we are and where the U.S. ec...
Aug 27, 2016•34 min
* The price of gold fell about $12/oz today; silver prices were down another .28 * Both metals have been falling since recent new yearly highs * Gold, though is not very much below the highs * The real carnage has been in the mining stocks, particularly today; today was one of the biggest down days I've seen all year * The GDX index was down just over 7% * Some of the mining stocks were down 10% or more on a very small move in the price of gold and silver * In fact, we've wiped out the last 2 mo...
Aug 25, 2016•30 min
* The dollar was broadly weaker today with the dollar index closing down .85 to 94.78 * At that time gold was up about $18; sliver up about .25 * Then all of a sudden New York Fed Chairman William Dudley in an interview on Fox Business basically said that a September rate hike was still possible * Look, a September alien invasion is still possible, but I'm not going to waste my time preparing for it * What's amazing to me is how all of the villagers still come running every time a Fed official c...
Aug 17, 2016•35 min
* Today we got the official numbers for Q2 Non-Farm Productivity and the consensus was that it would increase for the first time in 3 quarters; the prior 2 quarters we saw a decline in productivity * So analysts were looking for a .5 increase in the second quarter * Instead, we got a decline of .5 * More importantly, this is the first 3-quarter consecutive decline in productivity since 1979 * That was the Carter years - stagflation, the misery index, sky-high inflation, sky-high interest rates *...
Aug 10, 2016•28 min
* What a difference a week makes, or maybe and economic report * The two big reports that everybody seems to focus on are the GDP numbers and the jobs numbers * It seems that the weaker the economy is, as measured by GDP, the more jobs, somehow, the economy seems to create * We got the jobs report for July and just a week earlier we got Q2 GDP * As I spoke about on the last podcast, that number was basically half of what Wall Street had been anticipating - less than half * They were looking for ...
Aug 06, 2016•38 min
* The carnage in global stock and bond markets continues; it really got started last night in Japan * The JGB (Japanese Government Bonds) dropped for the 3rd consecutive day * The biggest 3-day drop in bond prices in Japan in over 3 years, so yields surging, along with the Japanese yen * Of course, this is not supposed to be happening because they're doing more stimulus and they've got negative interest rates, yet the Japanese yen is appreciating anyway * The Reserve Bank of Australia also came ...
Aug 03, 2016•32 min
* Today the Federal Reserve concluded its 2-day FOMC meeting and it announced - surprise, surprise - that interest rates are not going up * But of course the statement was much more important than their actions because these days, it doesn't matter what the Fed does; all that matters is what they say they're going to do, or more accurately, what they will pretend to do * It really doesn't matter what they say, they're not going to do anything * I explained that on my last podcast; I explained it...
Jul 28, 2016•29 min
* It's official. The unthinkable, according to the status quo earlier in the campaign, Donald Trump is the Republican Nominee * Although many wrote him off as a candidate, I never did; I always said he was being underestimated * I believed his message would resonate given how horrible the economy actually is and what is really happening beneath the headlines * Everybody was proclaiming recovery and that we're on the right track and I knew that that wasn't the case * I knew there would be a lot o...
Jul 23, 2016•43 min
* I was in Las Vegas for the Freedom Fest and following that I went to Vancouver for a one-day gold conference * One of the things I wanted to discuss was some discussion about me on the www.kitco.com website and I think it was prompted by my itnterview with kitco, which you can see on my YouTube Channel * Whenever there is a discussion about me an argument develops between those who want to believe I never get anything right and those with believe I get a lot of things right * I thought one par...
Jul 20, 2016•38 min
* I'm sitting with Josh Crumb, the co-founder of a company that was originally called BitGold but following the acquisition of James Turk's GoldMoney they rebranded their company as GoldMoney * I agree with that decision because I think GoldMoney is more descriptive of what they are really doing with gold, than is BitGold * But the reason we're sitting here today is because I was so impressed with their company after having lengthy conversations with the other co-founder, Roy Sebag, that I reall...
Jul 09, 2016•59 min
* Today we got the Non-Farm Payroll report for the month of June * Remember the last 2 reports were quite weak and everybody was hoping for a rebound in June to prove that April and May were a fluke and not a new trend * In fact the Fed talked about that in their last FOMC meeting minutes * The consensus was for 180,000 jobs to be created and the range went from a low of 130,000 to as high as 235,000 * The consensus average of that range was 180,000 * The actual number came in at 287,000, over 1...
Jul 09, 2016•25 min
* Gold and silver prices continue to march higher * Gold was up another $7 today; it closed at $1363.20 - that is the high for the year * Silver was up .15 at $20.06 * Silver is now going up relative to the price of gold which is very for the precious metals complex * Gold stocks are on fire; the XAU index, a gold stock index was up 3.27% today * It's now up better than 135% on the year and well over 150% from the lows on the third week in January * But do you think that any major players on Wal...
Jul 07, 2016•33 min
* I wish everybody a happy July 4th weekend; U.S. markets will be closed * It's unfortunate that we can't really celebrate all the traditions that we're supposed to be honoring were lost generations ago * The values our founding fathers risked their lives for have all been lost * I wanted to comment on what is going on in the markets particularly today * Today was the capper on the week * You had silver prices up about a dollar an ounce * Gold closed up about $19, so gold closed above $1340 * Ma...
Jul 01, 2016•26 min
* It was Turnaround Tuesday in the global financial markets as stocks are recovering from 2 days of carnage following the surprise Brexit vote in the U.K. * The Dow was up almost 270 points today, NASDAQ up about 97 * But really the markets got beaten up the last couple days * The smallest bounce was from the banks, which have been beaten up the most * So they had the biggest drop and the smallest bounce * Which really shows you how weak that sector is * It couldn't even manage much of a dead ca...
Jun 29, 2016•34 min
* The British actually voted to leave the EU and it wasn't even that close * I think by midnight last night EDT it was obvious that Leave was going to beat Remain * I think it ended up 52% voting to Brexit and 48% voting to remain * Of course, the markets were taken by surprise, in fact, we had a rally in to the close on Thursday as everybody was so confident that the polls would be right, and the online casinos would be right and that it was pretty much a sure thing that the British would vote ...
Jun 25, 2016•31 min
