Venezuelans have turned to illegally mining gold just to survive.
The Pemon people are native to the region containing Canaima National Park. If you saw the movie Up, you’re familiar with this area. The 500 million-year-old pillars of erosion in the park inspired scenery in the movie. The park also contains world-famous Angel Falls. But with hyperinflation gripping the country and the bolivar virtually worthless, people in the area have turned to digging up football-size mines in search of fragments of gold.
Yesterday was another bad Monday on Wall Street. The Dow Jones dropped nearly 400 points and the NASDAQ fell deeper into “correction territory,” dropping another 3%. All five “FAANG” stocks closed in bear territory. These are the tech stocks that have propelled the long bull market. The NASDAQ is down 12.5% this quarter.
Apple’s announcement that it plans to cut production weighed heavily on the markets, along with another sign of trouble in the housing market — a big drop in homebuilder sentiment.
Peter said homebuilder sentiment is the first sign that the confidence bubble has popped.
We continue to see new innovations using gold in the field of healthcare. The next time you have surgery or cut yourself, doctors could close you up with a substance using the yellow metal.
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.
