After her testimony to Congress this week, the mainstream media reported that Janet Yellen has put the Federal Reserve on the path to raising interest rates. However, Peter Schiff digs into Yellen’s official testimony from this week, showing beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Fed hasn’t even begun to think about a rate hike. It’s all right there in Yellen’s official prepared remarks. Peter also addresses the ridiculous popular notion that inflation is necessary for economic growth.
James Grant, Founder of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, spoke with Kitco about his disappointment in the current price of gold. He places most of the blame on central banking, and the market’s inability to understand the long-term consequences of monetary manipulation. However, Grant believes it won’t be long before the world wakes up to the realities of this manipulation and returns to gold as a safe-haven investment.
The gold price, is to me, the reciprocal of the world’s faith in the words, deeds of these central bankers… The lower the confidence [in central banking], the higher the gold price.
“I, for one, can’t imagine why anyone would have confidence in the doctrines of central banking, predicated as they are on the manipulation of prices. Interest rates are prices. Central banks are in the business now, more than ever, of manipulating interest rates. They are inflating asset markets. It seems to me that the world will eventually see that these policies are non-starters.”
The US Justice Department has begun to investigate whether 10 of the world’s largest banks have manipulated gold and silver prices. The Justice Department is just the latest in a series of financial regulators to investigate possibilities of precious metals manipulation, including the UK Financial Conduct Authority, Germany’s BaFin, and Switzerland’s competition commission WEKO. On top of that, there are a number of pending civil lawsuits in New York against some of these same banks for gold price rigging.
What should physical gold and silver investors take away from this news?
The Dow and S&P 500 once again closed at record highs last Friday, and investors continue to be bullish on the American economy. Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller sees things differently and has been warning of market bubbles.
A bubble is a social epidemic of enthusiasm and excitement spread by word of mouth, attracting more and more investors into a market.”
In the new edition of his book Irrational Exuberance, Shiller argues that many traditional investment assets are now driven by investor psychology rather than fundamental realties. From housing to stocks to bonds, Shiller sees the American economy entering a new era in which traditional investment approaches need to be reconsidered.
374 metric tons of gold were withdrawn from the Shanghai Gold Exchange (SGE) in the first 6 weeks of 2015. During the same period, about 300 tons of gold were newly mined in the entire world. Using these figures, China is currently consuming more gold than the world is producing.
The surge in Chinese gold consumption comes from preparations for the Chinese New Year celebrations, which began last week. Gold is one of the most traditional gifts to give during this holiday, but it’s not the only product the Chinese buy. They spend astounding amounts of money during this celebration: $100 billion in 2014, which was twice what Americans spent during the Thanksgiving and Black Friday holiday weekend.
ADS Securities Chief Market Strategist Nour Eldeen Al-Hammoury explained to Bloomberg why he’s betting on the United States sliding back into recession in 2015. Just like Peter Schiff, he finds the GDP, factory orders, trade deficit, and other economic data points to be much more indicative of the true health of the economy than the bogus jobs numbers.
Since the end of QE, until today, most of the numbers – more than 70% of the numbers – came in far away from the expectations. If you go back to the history, every single QE, when the QE stops, the economy slides back into a recession…”
Renowned hedge fund manager John Paulson is committed to gold. A new government filing from Paulson & Co. shows that as of December 31st, it remains the largest holder in the SPDR Gold Trust (GLD). It owns 10.33 million shares of GLD, the biggest gold exchange-traded fund in the world. Paulson’s company has maintained this stake for a year and a half.
Gold-backed ETFs saw nearly 70 tons of gold inflows in January, the largest since September 2012. The majority of that – 49 million tons – occurred in GLD. However, speculative interest in the metal has dropped again in February, and GLD has fallen more than 8% from its January high.
Speculators think the January surge in the gold price was a short-term reaction to volatility in Europe, and many investors are now placing their bets on the supposed economic recovery of the United States. Paulson seems to be looking at things differently and sees inflation looming in America’s future.
Eric Sprott, the well-known billionaire asset manager, believes that investors need to buy gold and silver to protect themselves from the increasingly volatile currency markets. Last year, 84% of the world’s population would have made money owning gold. Sprott puts his money where his mouth is, claiming that 80% of his assets are in precious metals.
Since this January interview, the gold price has fallen in US dollars. However, Sprott is focused on the long-term picture of how the radical monetary policies of global central banks will damage the global economy. With banking policies like negative interest rates and massive money printing, the world is experiencing a completely new financial landscape. When paired with the fact that gold demand seems to be exceeding supply, he expects to see gold-backed currencies within the next decade.
Wal-Mart announced yesterday that it is going to raise its minimum wage to $9 an hour, which will affect a half-million employees. Many are praising the company and saying this will improve the lives of low-wage workers, while also providing a boost to the American economy. However, Peter Schiff isn’t so optimistic. He explained to Yahoo! Finance why Wal-Mart’s minimum wage increase isn’t necessarily a net positive for the economy.
The wage increase will cost Wal-Mart about $1 billion this year. Who knows if Wal-Mart will pass along the cost of higher wages to its customers by raising prices? More importantly, Wal-Mart will probably cut back on hiring, which means low-income Americans will have that much more difficulty finding a job.
In his new Gold Videocast, Peter Schiff explained how Obamacare has created a “job-sharing” economy that is skewing the government’s employment data. As he put it:
Obamacare forces employers to provide insurance for full-time employees. As a result, employers are hiring more part-time workers than they normally would and that is substantially influencing these numbers… [Suppose an employer] cuts [two full-time workers’] hours back to 10 hours a week and then he actually hires two more guys. So now he has four guys working 40 hours instead of two guys working 80 hours. He’s cut the hours in half but doubled his workforce. According to the government, he’s just created two jobs even though he has four people sharing one job.”
