It looks just like a reality show that's not going to be renewed for another season. President Obama's State of the Union ratings are headed in the same direction as American Idol's so far this season – down. Let me make a secret confession right here. For years, the producer of ...read more

I would not touch bonds with a barge pole, especially government bonds. After 40 years of unending fiat money expansion, the world suffers from excess levels of debt. A lot of this debt will never be repaid. My expectation is that the market will increasingly question the ability and the ...read more

For more than one hundred years, governments have been trying to kill gold's role in the monetary system. They've dreamed of a day when the cursed metal would vanish completely except as jewelry and luxurious adornment. And yet its monetary properties won't go away. Central banks still hold it, and ...read more

Whether it's pirated software, poison-infused baby formula, cancer-causing drywall, luxury purses or fake medicines, if you need a knockoff, China has traditionally been the go-to country, with a counterfeiter always willing to oblige. Now, with precious metals prices on the cusp of possibly the biggest price explosion in centuries, fake gold ...read more

Watching the euro melt has been like watching a train wreck in slow motion. You knew it was coming. You know which cars on the train are next line to be mashed. There is nothing you can do to stop it. You can only watch as it happens, with one ...read more

In a recent Financial Times, Martin Wolf writes again about the European debt crisis, a problem for which, so he believes, there is a political solution. Mr. Wolf correctly identifies the problem: Most sovereign states are bust and so are the banks, which are today a protectorate of the state and ...read more

China is an important trading partner of America. But it may also be a mortal threat. And not for the conventional reasons usually cited in the press. Ironically, it is a threat because China is in fact a financial colony of the United States, a colony subsidized and sustained by ...read more

With gold making its expected pullback we needed a chuckle so we checked the New York Times and found this article from yesterday... No one I spoke to would venture a guess as to how high gold would rise before it hit its peak. But most stressed that people forgot that ...read more

Let us look at some awful analysis of gold, courtesy of Wells Fargo Bank. Perhaps channelling their inner Michael Pascoe, the bank’s analysts told clients, “Interest in gold investing has reached the level of a speculative bubble.” Having thus be-clowned themselves, they went on to elaborate: gold prices are volatile, gold ...read more

Slow news day, huh? We are kidding, of course, good patrons. There's been some pretty big news. The  S&P was forced to admit what we fringe pundits and kibitzers have been saying for years: U.S. debt is not quite as sound as the official ratings agencies would like you to believe. The S&P ...read more