There is a $33.7 trillion elephant in the living room.
I’m referring to the massive national debt.
It’s pretty amazing that we have this massive animal sitting right in the middle of everything and most people are just walking around it as if it isn’t there.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said he’s not confident interest rates are high enough to slay price inflation. He also said he’s not confident they aren’t. In this episode of the Friday Gold Wrap podcast, host Mike Maharrey wonders out loud why we should have any confidence if Powell doesn’t. Along the way, he breaks down the November Fed meeting and talks about the “colossal” year for central bank gold buying.
The boom in AI could mean a boom in industrial demand for precious metals in 2024.
Metals Focus, an independent precious metals research consultancy, released a note recently that said it expects the increased demand for chips powering AI technology to drive “widespread support for a range of precious metals bearing components.”
Silver is expected to play a significant role as the “green economy” evolves. The Silver Institute recently participated in a panel discussion titled “Silver’s Role in the Green Economy” at the London Bullion Market Association’s Global Precious Metals Conference in Barcelona, Spain.
This is one of several silver-related stories in the latest edition of Silver News published by the Silver Institute.
Japan is in the midst of a slow-motion train wreck. The country has a massive national debt and it is starting to feel the pressure of rising interest rates. In his podcast, Peter Schiff talked about the situation in Japan and pointed out some disturbing parallels to what’s happening in the US.
After setting a record through the first half of the year, central banks continued to gobble up gold in the third quarter.
Globally, central banks added a net 337 tons of gold in Q3, the second-highest third-quarter total on record behind 2022.
Through the first nine months of the year, central banks bought a net of 800 tons of gold. That’s 14% more than through the same period in 2022.
Does the massive national debt matter?
A lot of people don’t think it does, at least not yet. They point to Japan as an example of a country that has a much higher debt-to-GDP ratio and is doing fine. Peter Schiff said they’re looking at the wrong country. The US is more like Argentina than Japan.
A Georgia couple nearly lost more than $186,000 in a gold scam. But they ended up turning the tables and scamming the scammers.
The mainstream remains optimistic about the trajectory of the economy. Price inflation has supposedly been beaten down. GDP growth was even better than expected, and most economists have tabled their recession predictions. But in his podcast, Peter Schiff explained that it’s all an illusion. The financial crisis has already started, and it continues to play out beneath the radar.
Nobody understands that this crisis has started. But believe me, it has. This was the way the 2008 financial crisis started. It didn’t just happen when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt.”
When it comes to economic data, context matters. In this episode of the Friday Gold Wrap, host Mike Maharrey explains how the Fed, many mainstream economists, and financial network talking heads get a lot wrong because of bad data, shoddy economic frameworks, and ignorance of history. Along the way, he covers the GDP and the latest price action for gold.
