‘Tis the season for Christmas specials.
I’m not going to lie – even as a grown man, I love watching Christmas specials. Snoopy decorating his dog house. The Grinch folding up the Christmas tree like an umbrella and stuffing it up the chimney. And Frosty the snowman melting in the greenhouse.
We got more bad inflation news this week as the Federal Reserve wrapped up its final FOMC meeting of the year. Supposedly, the central bank has launched its war on inflation. Has it though? In this episode of the Friday Gold Wrap podcast, host Mike Maharrey talks about inflation and the Fed meeting and explains why it looks more like the Fed is taking a pea shooter into a bazooka fight.
Russians have gone on a gold-buying spree.
According to Russian media reports, investors in the country have bought a record amount of gold since 2014 despite prohibitively high taxes.
The federal government continues to run big budget deficits as spending skyrockets. Increasing tax revenues are the only thing keeping the deficits from blowing up even further. But how long will this tax windfall last?
The latest seasonally adjusted inflation rate for November was .76% month over month, with a non-seasonally adjusted annual rate of 6.81%.
These numbers were generally in line with mainstream expectations that have finally gotten high enough to match the blistering hot inflation numbers coming out month after month.
Pretty much everybody now expects the Federal Reserve to go to war against inflation, but the central bank has a problem not many people seem to be talking about – an economy buried under debt. In this episode of the Friday Gold Wrap podcast, host Mike Maharrey talks about consumer debt levels and their ramifications. He also discusses central bank gold-buying and breaks the November CPI data live.
Global ETF gold holdings increased in November for the first time since this summer.
Gold-backed ETFs saw net inflows of 13.6 tons last month. Total holdings rebounded from year-to-date lows to 3,578 tons. According to the World Gold Council, investment demand for larger gold ETFs returned with decades-high inflation and heightened market volatility.
The October trade deficit fell but the drop was primarily due to a data anomaly.
October 2021 charted a total trade deficit of -$67.1 billion. It was the lowest trade deficit since April 2021. Month-on-month, the trade deficit fell 17% from the record set in September.
Similar to August and September, the total national debt has not increased due to the current debt ceiling that’s in place. Similar to August, the Treasury has raided public retirement accounts to continue funding government spending (light green bar below).
Looking at the bigger picture, Covid has forever shifted the landscape of US Debt.
Over the last several years, we’ve seen strong central bank gold-buying. The surge in gold purchases has primarily been driven by a handful of consistent players. But over the last several months, we’ve seen several new countries enter the market.
The most recent is Ireland.
