Independence Day has always been one of my favorite holidays. I love the food, the fireworks and the parades. And the message of independence has always resonated with me – ever since I was a little kid.
Unfortunately, Fourth of July festivities have been canceled in most cities and counties – by governments. Which is painfully ironic.
Gold just had its best quarter since 2016 and finished at its highest level in over eight years. But Q2 2020 wasn’t an anomaly. Gold has charted gains for seven consecutive quarters.
That represents the longest quarterly run of gains for the yellow metal since the 2008 financial crisis.
Don’t expect the Federal Reserve to pull back on its monetary Hail Mary anytime soon.
The central bank released the minutes from the June meeting yesterday. There were no big surprises, but they did reaffirm the Fed’s commitment to continuing its unprecedented monetary policy into the foreseeable future.
So, I’m just going to throw this out there. If you get an email from a couple of veterans who claim they rescued a sultan’s son and got a big payout in gold, it might be a scam.
Maybe.
And by maybe, I mean it’s a scam.
Confession: I am prone to lose things.
I spend an inordinate amount of time looking for my glasses. I had to put a big lanyard on my keys to help me keep up with them. There’s even a running joke with one of my best friends about the frequency of losing my car in the parking lot.
But in all my years of losing stuff, I can’t match some poor soul in Switzerland. Last October, somebody left a package of gold bars on a Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) train valued at about $190,000.
The national debt pushed above $26 trillion last week. In just a little over two months, the US government has added over $2 trillion to the debt. The budget deficit has already set an all-time record with four months left in the fiscal year. In April, the US Treasury sold $1.287 trillion in additional US debt.
So, who is buying all of this debt?
When the May jobs report came out with 2.5 million jobs added a drop in unemployment to 13.3%, I told several friends the numbers seemed implausible.
It appears I might have been right.
The Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics survey takers mistakenly misclassified about 4.9 million people as employed, although they were unemployed.
Just when you thought the Federal Reserve couldn’t possibly stimulate any more, it launches a new stimulus program.
On Monday, the central bank announced it would begin buying individual corporate bonds through its so-called Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility (SMCCF).
You can stop looking now. It took 10 years but somebody finally found the treasure.
If you have ever handled gold leaf, you know it’s pretty thin. Paper-thin, in fact. But did you know we can go thinner?
In fact, scientists can take gold and silver into two dimensions. Sounds crazy, eh? Like flat earth or something. But the research team of Ulrich Starke and his former doctoral student Stiven Forti have successfully created a gold layer only a single atom thick. It’s two-dimensional gold, so to speak.
