Financial Sense Blog

Despite the fact that the S&P is up over 80% in the last 21 months, US financial firms are currently tripping over each other in their zeal to raise their S&P 500 and GDP targets for 2011. JPMorgan's chief US equities strategist, Thomas Lee, came out on December 3rd with a target of 1425 on the S&P for 2011, which would be a 15 percent gain.

The US is rapidly approaching a debt trap.

The structural changes that have taken place over the last 9 weeks remain intact and will likely resume after some of the 4 & 8 largest can add long and/or spread positions in order to minimize future losses. Judging by the way the way this has played out over the last eight or nine weeks, I would suspect this same trend to continue which goes along with higher silver prices.

Good morning. With stocks breaking out to new two-year highs on Friday and just about every major index now clearly in an uptrend, there is talk of the stars aligning for a new leg up in the bull market that began on March 10, 2009. And while the bears do still have some points to make, it is becoming obvious to anyone on the short side that the game just doesn't seem to be going their way right now and may not for some time to come.

On 7 December, gold hit an all-time high above US$1,425 per ounce (London morning fix), after having risen from under $300 per ounce at the beginning of the millennium and from just over $700 per ounce only a little over two years ago (all figures in current dollars).

Fear of inflation is growing, yet the U.S. shows all the classic symptoms of deflation. How can retail price inflation co-exist with a long wave deflationary trend? The answer can be found in a phenomenon known as "retroflation."

Wars between major countries are no longer fought on the high seas, or on land with vast armies, but in board rooms and markets. It’s now economic warfare that threatens to alter the global landscape, enriching the winners and creating hardship for losers.

We are all used to reading that gold rose because the dollar fell or that gold fell, because the dollar rose. The picture conjured up is one of traders racing in to actually buy or sell gold as they watch the exchange rate move.

Of late it seems that rising interest rates and the Fed’s ability to “keep rates low” have become a focal point for many of the news commentators. The vast majority of the public believes that the Fed is actually controlling interest rates and as a result that they are controlling the credit markets as well as the equity markets.

The brief history of Google is nothing short of amazing. Just twelve years after being founded in a Menlo Park, California garage, Google has become a catch-all verb describing Internet search itself and a company that generates nearly $28 billion in annual revenue with a market capitalization of about $180 billion (roughly equal to Singapore’s or Egypt’s GDP).