It is widely believed that silver leads gold during bull markets for these metals. I wonder how this belief first arose and persists to this day given that it is contrary to the historical record.
The amount of gold mined in a year is only about 1.5% of the total existing stock of gold, which is why changes in gold production have almost no effect on the gold price. It is also why changes in the cost of mining gold do not affect the...
The following monthly chart shows that relative to a broad basket of commodities*, gold commenced a very long-term bull market (47 years and counting) in the early-1970s. It’s not a fluke that this bull market began at the same time as the...
Many assets show signs of being immersed in bubbles right now. The most obvious example is the cryptocurrency speculation, which includes Bitcoin, the numerous and rapidly-multiplying Bitcoin alternatives and, more recently, the stocks...
To paraphrase Einstein, not everything worth measuring is measurable and not everything measurable is worth measuring. The purchasing power of money falls into the former category. It is worth measuring, in that it would be useful to have...
The yield curve is a remarkably useful leading indicator of major economic and financial-market events. For example, its long-term trend can be relied on to shift from flattening to steepening ahead of economic recessions and equity bear...
The long-term economic oscillations between boom and bust are caused by changes in the money-supply growth rate. It can therefore make sense to monitor such changes, but doing so requires knowing how to calculate the money supply....
Many investors pigeon-hole themselves as “inflationists” or “deflationists”, where an inflationist is someone who expects more inflation over the years ahead and a deflationist is someone who expects deflation. I am grudgingly in the...
To paraphrase Jim Grant, gold’s perceived value in US$ terms is the reciprocal of confidence in the Fed and/or the US economy. Consequently, what I refer to as gold’s true fundamentals are measures of confidence in the Fed and/or the US...
This post is a rehash of something I wrote at TSI last September in response to the article titled “The Gold Standard and Debt Jubilee“. The article is a confused jumble of Marxist, biblical and capitalist ideas/assertions, but its gist is...