Financial Markets

We have entered the cycle of stagflation, which combines a continuous rise in prices and a slowing down of economic activity, precisely because of these sudden losses of purchasing power.

Egon von Greyerz and Matthew Piepenburg exchange thoughts on the real vs. surreal financial system. They specifically address the blunt reality of unimaginable debt levels, tanking GDP growth, rising inflation, negative-yielding bonds and declining consumer sentiment against a current environment of engineered market highs, SPAC and crypto mania and the semantic fantasy of policy makers pretending inflation is “transitory” rather than an unspoken and deliberate necessity.

How the physical gold price is set, and how physical and derivates markets around the world are connected and interact.

The Fed is trapped and can't raise rates. Tavi Costa firmly believes commodities, silver and the silver miners are primed to move higher.

Because of the size of the bubble, the implosion will be greater than any time in history. In such a depression everyone will suffer greatly, even gold holders. But just as in any crisis in history, physical gold will serve as the best insurance you can own.

After the Kaplan scandal, the Fed is fighting against another case of suspected insider trading this week. This time, the case concerns the trades made by the vice-president of the U.S. central bank, Richard Clarida. Clarida traded millions of dollars out of a bond fund into stock funds one day before Chair Jerome Powell issued a statement flagging possible policy action as the pandemic worsened, his 2020 financial disclosures show.

The ECB is building a Potemkin village of European public debt, to keep up appearances, hoping that inflation will not undermine the whole thing...

But the gold prices are not responding to the law of supply and physical demand. They are dependent on transactions on the futures markets, where the fund managers have more influence over the prices thanks to their paper investments with a high leverage effect...even if they don’t have a single ounce of metal in their hands.

Gold is currently under attack for not “doing enough,” despite two years of double-digit rises. Gold investors, however, are not greedy, they are patient, and they hold this physical rather than paper asset for the long game. And as for that long game, the inflation ahead, as well destruction of the currency in your pocket today and tomorrow, means today’s gold price is not nearly as relevant an issue as gold’s role in protecting far-sighted investors from what’s ahead.

Even if one were to print money and give it away for free in order to prop up consumption, it would be impossible to avoid the consequences, which are now clearly visible, of the inflation created by this monetary madness. The difficulties at the level of the production chain brought about by this inflation are now squeezing companies’ margins, and that is what FedEx’s results show us.