If you buy gold or silver, you’re going to pay a premium. So, what exactly is a premium and how is it determined? In this episode of the Friday Gold Wrap, host Mike Maharrey answers common questions about premiums. He also discusses the debt ceiling deal and reveals where Americans rank gold as a long-term investment.
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.
The debt ceiling fight is getting down to the wire. In a letter to Congress on Monday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that without a debt ceiling increase, it was highly likely the government wouldn’t be able to meet all of its obligations by “early June, and potentially as early as June 1.”
Despite the drama, I still expect Congress to get a deal done. And that’s when the real problems begin.
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.
On an annual basis, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) increased by 4.9% in April. While that’s an improvement over last year, it’s still not good. It’s more than twice the Federal Reserve inflation target. And as Peter Schiff pointed out during a recent interview with Jesse Kelly, the reality is even worse than the numbers indicate.
Was the producer price data that came out late last week really more good news on the inflation front?
That’s certainly how the mainstream media spun it. But as was the case with the April CPI data, the mainstream spin didn’t necessarily reflect reality.
In fact, there is a pro-government, pro-official narrative bias that pervades the mainstream media, including the financial media.
