In another sign the financial crisis continues to bubble under the surface, banks borrowed an additional $3.7 billion from the Federal Reserve’s bank bailout program in July.
Currently, there are $106.9 billion in outstanding loans in the Bank Term Funding Program (BTFP).
In another blow to dollar dominance, India and the United Arab Emirates settled an oil trade without converting local currencies to dollars for the first time on Monday, as India’s top refiner made a payment for oil in rupees.
Indian Oil Corp. bought a million barrels of oil from Abu Dhabi National Oil Company in a dollar-free transaction.
Silver is significantly undervalued right now. One analyst called the current price in the $22 an ounce range “inexcusably low.”
But many analysts are bullish on silver in the medium term with projections of prices climbing to $50 to $100 an ounce over the next two to five years.
The question is when will we finally start to see this correction?
To hear President Joe Biden tell it, the US economy is booming. Meanwhile, the Biden administration is running monthly budget deficits that you would normally see during a deep recession.
With two months left to go, the deficit for fiscal 2023 now stands at $1.61 trillion, after the federal government charted another massive shortfall in July.
And Biden wants to spend even more.
The annual increase in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) ticked up in July, after two months of big drops, revealing that price inflation might be down, but it certainly isn’t out.
On an annual basis, CPI rose 3.2% in July, a tick higher than the 3% yearly increase in June, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
After the Federal Reserve incentivized borrowing with more than a decade of artificially low interest rates and easy money, the debt chickens are coming home to roost.
Last week, Fitch Ratings downgraded the US’s long-term credit rating from AAA to AA+, and on Monday, Moody’s cut the credit rating of 10 small and midsize banks.
Flashing another recession warning sign, credit card spending suddenly fell off a cliff in June.
American consumers have been using credit cards to make ends meet for months, but with credit card debt at record levels, rising interest rates appear to have slammed the door on spending. Credit card debt contracted in June for the first time since April 2021, according to the most recent data released by the Federal Reserve.
On August 1, a law making gold and silver legal tender in Arkansas went into effect. The new law also effectively repeals the state capital gains tax on gold and silver.
Enactment of this legislation will relieve some of the tax burden on investors, and take a step toward treating precious metal bullion as money instead of a commodity.
Is price inflation really heading back toward the Federal Reserve’s 2% target?
Most people in the mainstream seem to think so, and the recent drop in the consumer price index (CPI) appears to support this belief. Price inflation has trended downward over the last several months, with the annual CPI falling from a high of 9% last year to just 3% in July. But I don’t think the Fed has won the inflation fight and I don’t believe the central bank’s sanguine inflation outlook is correct.
I think easing price inflation is transitory.
There’s a big problem that pretty much everybody is ignoring.
In just two months since Congress reached a deal and suspended the debt ceiling for two years, the national debt has surged by a staggering $1.2 trillion.
Within a week of the debt ceiling suspension, the national debt cracked $32 trillion and as of July 28, it stood at $32.66 trillion.