Two charts and three measures of gold's "real" price today... GOLD'S CURRENT price-tag of $1,000 an ounce suggests big doubts over the US Dollar, its domestic economy, and its status as the world's No.1 reserve currency. Or so we guess after 10 years of watching it quadruple from two-decade lows. But gold ...read more

"Whether through exuberant hedgies or anxious private investors, gold just keeps pushing higher..." So speculative betting on gold going higher now equals a record-busting 752-tonne position in Comex futures and options, yet this is not a bubble according to Michael Pento of Deltaga. Let's say otherwise. Let's say that gold prices, surging ...read more

"If gold is 'past its day', what of toxic derivatives and today's deluge of US Treasury bonds...?" Just like poor Pip Dickens' Great Expectations, central banks keep inheriting unwelcome bequests. Today's "legacy assets" are toxic derivatives; a decade ago it was gold reserves. Both are proving hard to shrug off, but for ...read more

"Just how can the Fed credibly promise to be irresponsible...?" Here’s a thought—that tiny handful of investors and analysts warning how Fed policy risks hyper-inflation are in fact doing the central bank's work. The Fed wants you to believe hyperinflation is looming. Or at least, it should want that, if doubling its ...read more

"Legally defining the official dollar/gold price and backing it with convertibility is the only means by which...the markets can be assured that Volcker's successors would not be tempted to try another monetarist experiment." -Jude Wanniski, former Reagan advisor, April 1982 So does the price of gold rise or fall in a deflation? Hint: ...read more

"We didn't abandon the money-supply aggregates. They abandoned us..." TIME WAS that central banks targeted and fretted about keeping their currency stable against the Dollar. But as the Dollar-led inflation of 1950-1980 destroyed the value of bonds and savings worldwide – and then destroyed equities, as well as any sober hope of ...read more

"We are entering upon waters for which I have no chart and in which I therefore feel myself an utterly incompetent pilot." – James Warburg of the banking dynasty, resigning as President Roosevelt's monetary advisor, 1933 Want to know where the price of gold, oil, the S&P, Euro or overseas stock markets ...read more

Deprecated and reduced as a financial asset, gold is fast-gaining new buyers yet remains under-invested compared to previous crises... "FEAR, Mr. Bond, takes gold out of circulation and hoards it against the evil day," as 007 learns from a Bank of England officer in Ian Fleming's Goldfinger (1959). So "in a period ...read more

Whether inflation or deflation strikes, a growing number of people are fast buying gold for defence... It’s common knowledge that gold bullion proved the most reliable wealth-store during the vicious inflation of the late 1970s. Yet almost un-noticed, gold has once again been the best-performing asset bar none this decade, too. Gold ...read more

The broad sweep in housing-gold ratios is just as broad and as sweeping as both gold bulls and bears might hope... Even the UK's small, tightly packed mainland, floating off the edge of Europe, includes disparate and distinct real-estate markets. Glasgow is as different from London as Cornwall from Cheshire. But ...read more