The federal government ended up fiscal 2018 with the largest budget deficit since 2012. Based on the most recent US Treasury Department projections, that doesn’t look to slow down in fiscal 2019.
A few months ago, during a major downpour, I noticed water drip, drip, dripping onto the floor of my guest bedroom. I put a bucket under it and climbed into the attic, horror clawing at the edges of my mind. Was I about to need a new roof?
If you’re a homeowner, you probably share my dread of the roof going bad. It’s generally one of the highest home-repair cost you will ever encounter. It can run you over $10,000 just to replace a modest size roof.
Now, imagine if your roof was made out of gold.
The SchiffGold Friday Gold Wrap podcast combines a succinct summary of the week’s precious metals news coupled with thoughtful analysis. You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.
As we’ve noted before, Keynesian central planners suffer from fatal conceit. They think they are smart enough to plan and direct the economy better than the free market. When you boil it all down, these people believe they can do a better job of making your economic decisions than you can. After all, a free market is nothing more than the aggregate of all of our individual economic choices. Paul Krugman serves as the poster child for central planning arrogance, but another Nobel Prize-winning central planner is making a name for himself by tearing down the free market. Joseph Stiglitz claims capitalism is “rigged.” But as economist Bill Anderson shows in an article recently published on the Mises Wire, Stiglitz has got it completely wrong. Capitalism – in the true sense of the word – isn’t rigged. Socialism is.
Peter Schiff put it pretty bluntly in a podcast last week. We don’t have a booming economy. We have bubbles. And it looks like the air is starting to come out of some of those bubbles. We see signs of trouble, particularly in interest rate-sensitive sectors such as real estate. As just one example, home sales in California have hit the lowest level in a decade. And it’s not just California. We’re seeing declines in many of the “most splendid housing bubbles” in America. Even more troubling is that we’re seeing these tremors and interest rates aren’t historically high.
Yet.
But they are rising quickly. According to an article in Wolf Street, they may soon hit 6% and that could be the real tipping point.
Generally, when the mainstream talks about gold, you get a negative spin. So, whenever I see anybody in the mainstream talking positively about the yellow metal, I sit up and take notice. Well, MarketWatch had some positive things to say about gold recently, calling it “the best house in bad neighborhood” for 2019.
Last week, we got data on the producer price index. It came in at o.6%, a much hotter number than expected. It was the biggest jump in the PPI in six years. Year-over-year, producer prices are up 2.8%.
Analysts expected the monthly increase to come in at half that – 0.3%. While the Fed typically looks at consumer prices to gauge inflation, producer prices are also significant. After all, the cost of production is ultimately passed on to the consumer.
As soon as that PPI number came out, the price of gold dropped about $10. As Peter Schiff pointed out in a recent podcast, this is because the markets still don’t get it. They are playing checkers instead of chess.
The silver-gold ratio hit the highest level in over a quarter century this week.
The ratio hit to 86:1 as dollar strength pulled both the price of silver and gold lower this week after the Federal Reserve indicated it plans to keep pushing interest rates higher. The price of silver fell even more steeply than the gold price. A research note by Commerzbank said it was that largest gap between the two metals in 25 years. Practically speaking, this means silver is undervalued compared to gold.
Despite all of the warning signs, the mainstream is still convinced the “economic boom” will continue and the Fed will keep pushing interest rates up. As a result, the price of gold has stayed relatively low. But as Peter pointed out in his most recent Gold Videocast, their complacency is ill-advised, and gold is a mispriced asset. Now is the time to buy.
Americans took on another $10.9 billion in debt in September, according to data released by the Federal Reserve. That pushed total consumer debt to a seasonally adjusted $3.95 trillion. American indebtedness is growing at a 3.3% rate.
But there are signs that American credit card borrowing is slowing down and that’s not good news in an economy built on consumer spending and debt.