That’s a question that Westerners have been asking for, oh, several millennia now. Or at least since Marco Polo aimed his ponies down the old Silk Road in 1271. Now as then, China keeps its own counsel. We know what they want us to know, plus what we can surmise from ...read more

U.S. banks are going bad as quickly as a bunch of over-ripe peaches in the summer heat. On the heels of the Colonial Bank failure comes another sizable bank failure. Guaranty Bank in Texas became the 81st U.S. bank to fail this year. It was the 11th largest bank failure in ...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

There’s a lot of Internet chatter these days about the possibility of the U.S. government seizing its citizens’ private gold holdings. What are the chances? Well, it’s always good to bear in mind that there is no telling what the government might do. It’s already doing things that were unthinkable just a ...read more

The market clearly is not worried about inflation right now. That is the only way to explain recent 10-year Treasury yields of 3.30%. The deflationist view is the one that prevails. This view, which makes some compelling and elegant arguments, maintains that the credit losses far surpass the monetary and ...read more

The first thing I do when I sit down at my desk in the morning is check the price of gold. The second thing I do is check the price of oil. Sure, the price for gold and oil changes all the time. Prices go up and down, for good and ...read more

Some Fridays are better than others. This last one was not pretty. Like a character that refuses to die in a bad horror movie, the U.S. job market posted some shocking June numbers. It has revived the dormant nightmare that this may be a long "L" shaped recession. Or even ...read more

It is a matter of almost holy writ with us here in the Whiskey Bar that "the poor man's gold" is something we should be buying with every spare non-silver dime we have.  We believe!  We believe! We believe on fundamentals, technicals, and common sense. We even believe all this in the ...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

I bet you don’t own enough gold. Before you tell me I’m wrong, let me ask it this way... If inflation returns, or even hyperinflation... If the economic crisis persists and gets worse... If uncertainty and fear continue, and chaos and rioting begin... If stock markets languish or suffer another meltdown... If the recovery spending of ...read more