Bayern Munich soccer star Franck Ribéry struck back at detractors who went after him on social media because he had the audacity to post a video of himself eating a steak covered in 24-karat gold.
Oh, the horror!
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.
The Federal Reserve released minutes from the December Federal Open Market Committee meeting on Wednesday and it looks like the “Powell Put” might be in.
The minutes revealed a much more dovish sounding Fed as we move into 2019. Members of the FOMC indicated they could be “patient” with future rate hikes and said the future path of the central bank’s monetary policy is “less clear.”
What is clear is that Powell and company seem to be getting cold feet when it comes to continuing on an aggressive tightening policy. The question is why?
Gold will have an increasingly relevant role to play in investors’ portfolios in 2019.
This was the conclusion of the World Gold Council’s Outlook 2019 Report.
In the report, the WGC highlights three key trends it thinks will influence gold demand and price performance in the coming year.
Total holdings in global gold-backed ETFs finished above $100 billion in 2018, according to the latest data by the World Gold Council. It’s the first time ETF total gold holdings have eclipsed the $100 billion mark since 2012.
Globally, ETFs added 69 tons of gold in 2018, bringing total holdings to 2,440 tons valued at $100.6 billion.
Germany appears to be on the cusp of a technical recession.
Production in Germany fell by 1.9% in November. Analysts had expected a 0.3% gain. The German statistical agency Destatis also revised October to a 0.8% decline. It was the third straight month of declines.
As WolfStreet put it, “This is embarrassing in the land of super-stimulus via the ECB’s negative-interest-rate policy and years of QE that were supposed to perform miracles.”
Wall Street has been on a roller coaster ride over the last few months. If you listen to the pundits on the financial networks, you’ll hear the word “volatile” used over and over again. That word certainly seems to describe the current state of US stock markets and in a broader sense the economy. But during a recent interview on RT News with Rick Sanchez, Peter Schiff said it’s not that the economy is volatile. It’s actually a bubble. And we are on the verge of a bigger crisis than the one we went through in 2008.
2018 ended up as the worst year for US stocks in a decade. And last month ranked as the worst December on Wall Street since 1938. But if you owned gold, things weren’t quite as painful for you as they were for investors without any of the yellow metal. While stocks sagged, gold rallied.
In fact, gold outperformed the S&P 500 in December, through the fourth quarter, and over the entire year.
Last week, we saw more huge swings in US stock markets. On Thursday, stocks fell sharply, but they recaptured all the losses on Friday in the wake optimism about trade talks between the US and China, of a strong December jobs report, and “dovish” comments by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.
Peter Schiff hit on all of these topics in his most recent podcast.
Russia added another 36.6 tons of gold to its reserves in November, according to the latest data released by the World Gold Council.
This follows on the heels of a 29.9-ton increase to its hoard in October and a 37.8-ton increase in September.
