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.
We are well into the third quarter of 2018. In our perpetual fast-forward world, analysts are already looking toward Q4. What will the last quarter of the year bring?
It’s virtually impossible to predict the short-term. Who knows what kind of political event, natural disaster or emerging trend will drive the markets over the next few months?
Of course, we can’t predict the future at all. We’re not fortune tellers or Old Testament prophets, but as Dan Kurz notes in his latest post at DK Analytics, it is a bit easier to project what will happen to the economy in the long run because we can clearly see the big-picture dynamics and fundamentals underlying it. As he put it, he’s less sure where America is headed in Q4 than ‘down the road’ in general. The whole thing (political, financial, economic) could fall apart at any time.”
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.
How would you like to own a silver Rolls Royce?
I mean literally silver.
Now’s your chance.
The classic luxury car company is rolling out a limited-edition commemorative Silver Ghost – with actual silver incorporated into the design. As the AutoBlog put it, the four-door Rolls features judicious use of the precious metal.
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.”
