On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates again despite the problems in the banking system. In this episode of the Friday Gold Wrap, host Mike Maharrey talks about the Fed’s inflationary efforts to paper over the problems in the financial system while still keeping up the pretense of an inflation fight. He says it’s like trying to thread a needle with rope.
Peter Schiff recently appeared on Brighteon.com with Mike Adams to talk about the failure of SVB and Signature Bank, the bailouts and the potential ramifications. During the interview, Peter explained the difference between SchiffGold and a lot of the other gold companies out there.
Gold had a big rally last week. But is it sustainable? What are the technicals saying?
The data over the last several months continues to give insight into the market. November showed the market was in neutral, but then the December analysis correctly identified an impending move upwards, the January review called for a correction and then February concluded:
Given the potential impacts of the ongoing banking crisis, I will start this article with the conclusion.
The current banking crisis could not have come at a worse time for the Comex system. Inventories have seen massive depletion over the last 2+ years as investors have slowly been pulling physical out of the vaults. I have previously called this a run on the vault but labeled it as a stealthy one. As though certain investors did not want to raise the alarm, but slowly take possession while inventory was still available.
Friday gold wrap host Mike Maharrey has been saying something is going to break in the economy for months due to the Federal Reserve’s monetary tightening to fight price inflation. Last Friday, something broke when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed followed quickly by the demise of Signature Bank. It was the first crack in the dam. The Fed rushed in to plug the leak, but was it enough? In this episode of the podcast, Mike talks about the response to these bank failures and the possible ramifications.
The CPI came in at 0.37% for the month of February. While this was in line with expectations, it is still a 4.5% annualized increase in prices.
And falling energy prices made the CPI look cooler than it actually was.
Over the past several months, Mike Maharrey and I have posted numerous articles that conclude the same way… the Fed is bluffing and when something breaks, they will fold. On every podcast, Mike has walked through exactly why this is inevitable. Back in September, I laid out the math that showed why the Fed would fold and laid out a series of risks that may cause such an event. One of those risks was “What if the financial markets freeze because there is a credit event somewhere?”.
The Federal Government ran a deficit of -$262B in February. Ignoring the Student Loan forgiveness allocation in September last year, this is the largest monthly budget deficit since July 2021. And it’s the second-largest February deficit ever.
The failure of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank reminds us of a very important truth — if you can’t hold it in your hand, you don’t really own it.
That’s why it’s wise to hold at least some of your wealth in hard assets like gold and silver that are in your direct possession or at least stored in a secure, allocated, segregated, and insured storage facility.
As discussed last month, it is getting harder to take all the BLS employment data as fact. This month, some of the data is a bit closer in line, but the QECW report seemed to show a big deviation (more below).
