It’s all capitalisms fault!
What is?
Well, everything.
At least that’s the narrative you get from the political left, and quite frankly, not infrequently from the political right.
There are signs that the air may be coming out of the subprime credit card bubble.
According to numbers recently released by Federal Reserve, delinquency rates on credit card balances at commercial banks other than the largest 100 rose to 6.2% in the second quarter of this year. These are credit cards issued by the nearly 5,000 smaller banks in the US. According to Wolf Street, this actually exceeds the peak during the financial crisis and represents a better than 2% jump from a year ago.
Friday was an active day in the markets. The S&P 500, the Russell 2000 and the Nasdaq all hit record highs. The Dow Jones didn’t quite crack into record territory, but it was up over 100 points. Meanwhile, the dollar fell and gold was up more than $20.
In his latest podcast, Peter Schiff said he thinks the dovish speech by Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell at Jackson Hole drove all of this. And it could have longer-term ramifications.
Gold fell about 3% through the first half of August, dropping below the key $1,200 support level. But a report by the World Gold Council released this week lists three key fundamental and technical reasons the gold price may well rebound in the near future.
- An unusually short market
- Financial market uncertainty remains
- Natural buyers may step in
We are now officially in the longest bull market in US stock market history. Yesterday took out the record set in the 1990s. As Peter Schiff pointed out in his most recent podcast, the old record run ended in 2000.
And we all know how badly it ended. It ended with a 50% collapse, an 80% collapse in the Nasdaq, and the Federal Reserve had to slash interest rates to 1% and inflate a housing bubble in order to prop the market back up.”
Peter said he believes this bull market will meet a similar if not worse fate.
Tuesday marked the 167th anniversary of the discovery of gold in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia. Since then, the Aussies have become the second largest gold producing country in the world. But analysts project gold output in the Land Down Under, along with several other key countries, could slump to “generational lows” in the midterm.
Over the last couple of years, we’ve been reporting on efforts to remove the US dollar from its throne as the world reserve currency. We’ve primarily seen moves toward de-dollarization from countries like China and Russia, and other nations within their orbits. It’s easy for Americans to dismiss efforts to undermine the dollar as desperate moves by their enemies that will never gain any kind of international traction. But now we’re beginning to hear the same de-dollarization rhetoric from American allies.
Earlier this week, German foreign minister Heiko Maas called for the creation of a new payments system independent of the United States.
Russia has added to its gold reserves every month since March 2015. That trend didn’t end in July. In fact, the Russians ramped up their gold purchases even more last month in the face of US economic sanctions.
The Russian central bank added 26.1 tons of gold to its hoard in July, according to International Monetary Fund data reported by Bloomberg. It was the largest increase in Russian gold holdings since last November.
Through the last several presidential administrations, the US has maintained a “strong dollar” policy. As Peter Schiff pointed out in his most recent podcast, it wasn’t so much that you could pinpoint the specific tenets of the policy. It was more about the rhetoric that came out of Washington D.C. Everybody talked about the strong dollar being in the national interest.
Having the belief that there was some kind of hidden strong dollar policy helped to create confidence in the dollar. Even periods where the dollar was declining, perhaps it would have declined even more had it not been for the belief that there was some kind of strong dollar policy.”
But times have changed. As Peter put it, “It should be pretty obvious that Donald Trump has a weak dollar policy.”
There is plenty of bad news out there. We have a trade war. Geopolitical tensions between the US and Iran and the US and Russia are high. Turkey is in the midst of a currency crisis that some fear will spread beyond that country’s borders. So, why aren’t people seeking safe haven and buying gold and silver?
The CEO at Australia’s Perth Mint has a theory. Richard Hayes said bad news has become so prevalent nobody really pays attention to it anymore. In a nutshell, bad news has become the norm. As a Bloomberg report put it, “Investors have grown immune to the economic and geopolitical risks that typically drive haven demand for gold.”
