Passage of a GOP budget that added $300 billion in new spending has focused plenty of attention on surging federal government debt over the last week or so. But Uncle Sam isn’t the only one running up those credit cards. Everyday Americans are also piling on the debt.
Total household debt soared to a record $13 trillion dollars in 2017, according to the latest data released by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Center for Microeconomic Data.
Investor Jim Rogers has seen a lot in 75 years. So when he starts talking about the worst bear market in our lifetime, we probably ought to sit up and take notice.
And that’s exactly what Rogers said in a recent phone interview with Bloomberg.
When we have a bear market again, and we are going to have a bear market again, it will be the worst in our lifetime.”
During a podcast last week, Peter Schiff asked a key question: Who is going to buy all of this US debt?
The US Treasury Department plans to auction off around $1.4 trillion in Treasuries this year. And it won’t end there. The department expects that pace of borrowing to continue over the next several years.
That’s a lot of bonds. Who will buy them? Because the biggest purchasers of US debt aren’t in a buying mood.
The Babylon Bee captured the current state of the Republican Party in all of its hypocritical glory. The satirical website proclaimed “Republicans announce plan to pretend to be fiscally conservative again the moment a Democrat takes office.”
The GOP said it would begin to decry deficit spending and the $20 trillion debt in order to win votes as soon as political power swung back to the opposing party.
“‘The second a Democrat is back in the White House, we will once again start yelling about fiscal responsibility,’ Speaker Paul Ryan said in an address to the House of Representatives Friday. ‘For now, we will continue to vote for unsustainable and irresponsible budgets that your children’s children’s children will pay for for centuries to come.’”
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.
They call it the business “cycle” for a reason. Cycles repeat.
As Peter Schiff pointed out in a recent podcast, the financial crisis was triggered by rising interest rates on the debt that had been accumulated in the years prior as a result of the Federal Reserve keeping interest rates at 1% for a year-and-a-half and then slowly raising them back up over the course of another year-and-a-half.
Friday, the Dow Jones fell more than 600 points. It was the third big drop in a week. Most analysts mention nervousness about sharply rising bond yields as one of the reasons for the selloff. And what do rising bond yields reflect? Rising interest rates. So, are we seeing the beginning of the next big downturn in the business cycle?
Over the last two years, the Federal Reserve has been nudging interest rates higher and their efforts are starting to bear fruit in the marketplace. Bond yields are beginning to climb.
The question is how high can rates go before the house of cards the central bankers built comes tumbling down?
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.
Global wealth increased to a new record of $280 trillion in 2017, according to Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report 2017. That seems like pretty good news until you consider global debt is increasing nearly three times as fast.
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.
