I warned you.
I said when the fake debt ceiling fight ended, the real problems would begin.
Well, the debt ceiling fight is over, and here we are.
On the first working day after the so-called Fiscal Responsibility Act went into effect, the national debt surged by $359 billion.
With a debt ceiling deal done, the threat of a US government default is off the table for the time being. But a wave of corporate defaults is on the horizon according to Deutsche Bank’s annual default study.
This is the inevitable consequence of central bank monetary policy and it was entirely predictable.
In March, I warned that the commercial and investment real estate markets could be the next thing to break in this bubble economy. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal put a face on my warning.
The debt ceiling “crisis” is coming to a head. We’re pretty confident Republicans and Democrats will strike a deal and raise the debt ceiling. That’s supposed to solve the problem. But Friday Gold Wrap podcast host Mike Maharrey says the solution is the problem. In this episode, he also offers some bullish perspective on silver.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and former chair Ben Bernanke recently fielded questions together at the annual Thomas Laubach Research Conference put on by the central bank. They engaged in a lot of finger-pointing but didn’t offer a hint of self-reflection as they discussed inflation and the state of the economy.
We’ve talked about the recent selloff in gold. On the other side of the coin, the NASDAQ has made a string of 52-week highs. What is driving these market dynamics?
The Fed.
The markets generally believe that the Federal Reserve is finished hiking interest rates, or at least close enough to being done that a rate cut is on the horizon.
And they’re wrong.
We saw a big selloff in the gold market last week and the price dropped below $2,000 an ounce. The catalyst for that selloff was tough talk from several Federal Reserve officials and an increasing expectation that the central bank will raise rates again in June. As Peter Schiff explained in his podcast, everybody thinks the Fed is going to win the inflation fight because it is going to be even tougher. In reality, they are talking tougher because they are losing the fight.
There are a few things that Friday Gold Wrap host Mike Maharrey writes about that don’t seem to garner much interest. In this show, Mike is going to talk about two of those things, why they matter, and why you should care. He also talks about the recent drop in the price of gold and what the markets are getting wrong.
Gold had dropped by over $100 in the last two weeks. Meanwhile, the dollar rose to a 7-week high on May 17. If you’re thinking that this looks a lot like how gold and the dollar moved at the height of the Federal Reserve’s inflation fight, you’re right. That’s because the central bankers at the Fed have stepped up the hawkish rhetoric in the last couple of weeks increasing expectation that interest rates will stay higher for longer.
But talk is cheap. The real question is how will the Fed respond when the bottom drops out of the economy.
The US government ran a surplus in April, as it generally does in tax return month. But federal tax revenues collapsed year-on-year and the fiscal 2023 deficit is still close to $1 trillion despite the small April windfall.
