In this week’s Friday Gold Wrap Podcast, JD and Joel discuss why gold is down this week, soaring tech stocks and plummeting gold stocks, and other market and precious metals news.
Stocks and bonds had a tough week last week. In his podcast, Peter Schiff talked about the market moves in the context of Fed rhetoric and the jobs reports. He concluded that we could be heading toward another big leg down in bonds, and this bond bear will maul stocks and the dollar.
Americans consider gold the second-best long-term investment option, according to a recent Gallup poll. Gold beat out stocks, bonds and savings accounts.
The perception that gold is the best investment over the long term rose from 15% in 2022 to 26% in the 2023 poll, overtaking stocks at the number two spot.
This analysis focuses on gold and silver within the Comex/CME futures exchange. See the article What is the Comex? for more detail. The charts and tables below specifically analyze the physical stock/inventory data at the Comex to show the physical movement of metal into and out of Comex vaults.
In his latest podcast, Peter Schiff said we are basically enjoying the calm before the storm right now.
With the US missile strike in Syria, rumblings of a trade war and a generally weak dollar, gold briefly flirted with $1,365 last week. But the anticipation of Federal Reserve rate hikes continues to create strong headwinds against the yellow metal. Last week, the Fed released its March FOMC minutes and most analysts interpreted them as “hawkish.” In fact, many people now think the Fed will nudge rates up again in June, leaving six months to get in the much-anticipated third hike of the year and possibly even get in a fourth.
During a podcast last month, Peter Schiff asked a key question: who is going to buy all of the debt necessary to finance the ballooning US deficit?
In his most recent analysis, Dan Kurtz at DK Analytics explores this question more in-depth and comes to generally the same conclusion.
The dollar has lost more than 8% of its value over the last year. That decline may accelerate as bond investors sell ahead of a huge expansion in Treasuries coming into the market. Interest rates will have to climb significantly. The price of bonds will drop. As Dan put it, where bonds go, stocks follow.
We’ve excerpted some key points from Dan’s report.
The stock market plunge earlier this month reminds us why we should buy gold. As a report released by the World Gold Council shows, gold acted as a portfolio hedge during the brief downturn. The price of gold rose as stocks sold off; as stocks partially retraced their losses, gold trended lower.
But gold’s effectiveness improves when market corrections are wider or sustained for longer. In our view, the recent selloff is a good reminder that gold can deliver returns and reduce risk in portfolios.”
This is some food for thought especially in light of the fact we are ripe for a 1987-style market crash.
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.”
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.’”
In the weeks leading up to the December Federal Reserve rate hike, the price of gold fell and most mainstream analysts were bearish on the yellow metal. After all, rising interest rates are bad for gold. right? But we took a contrarian position, saying the negative relationship between rising interest rates and the price of gold is really more of a “sell the rumor, buy the fact” phenomenon.
As it turns out, we were right. In the weeks since the Federal Open Market Committee nudged the interest rate up another 25 basis points on Dec. 13, gold has outperformed most other major assets.
