Financial Sense Blog

The news rocked the global gold market when an almost obscure line item in the back of a 216 page document released by an equally obscure organization was recently unearthed. Thrust into the unwanted glare of the spotlight, the little publicized Bank of International Settlements (BIS) is discovered to have accepted 349 metric tons of gold in a $14B swap. Why? With whom? For what duration? How long has this been going on? This raises many questions and as usual with all $617T of murky unregulated swaps, we are given zero answers. It is none of our business!

Less than 24-hours after President Obama signed the historic Wall Street Reform bill into law the SEC suspended the rule that makes the rating agencies more accountable for their ratings. According to the Wall Street Journal, as recently as June 30 the rating agencies thought that the provision for increased accountability had been omitted. They were wrong

The Obama administration now says that Russian cheating on a new strategic arms agreement does not matter. America would still have plenty of nuclear weapons, and the Russians would never launch an attack. Let the Russians cheat if they like. There is nothing to gain by cheating. What will the Russians do with such an advantage? Will they attack?

I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news. There are no easy solutions. There are only painful, more painful, and really, really painful solutions. Both mainstream corrupted political parties have had the chance to put the country back on a prudent fiscal path.

We seem to do a lot of waiting. As 2009 ended, U.S. dollar was being forecast to be approaching the end of its existence. Presumably, we must continue to wait for that event. Moving on, forecasters had more recently been calling for imminent collapse of EU and vaporization of the Euro. Presumably, we must continue to wait for that event too. Many are still forecasting an imminent replacement of global currencies with Gold. Presumably, we must continue to wait for that too.

We have added a new page of charts to help us monitor the relative strength of equal-weighted indexes against their capitalization-weighted counterparts. Cap-weighted index values are dominated by the larger-cap stocks in the index. For example, the 50 largest-cap stocks in the S&P 500 represent about 70% of the index value.

The unemployment numbers for June 2010 were worse than articulated. The headline number said 83,000 private sector jobs were created and the unemployment rate slipped to 9.5% from 9.7%. Sounds like things are looking up. But, as you might expect, the devil is in the details and the details tell a different story.

Three categories of Investments Offer an Opportunity for both Profit and Protection in this Bear Market and Declining Economy: In addition to our #1 Selection - Gold, and our #2 - Silver, our #3 is the Selected High-Yield investments.

Mr. Treece provides a new perspective on the concept of gold as money, arguing that its lack of practical purpose makes it no better than any other currency.

The biggest balloon in the world is deflating. This balloon had been inflated with a quadrillion (1015) dollars, which is to say: This balloon was filled not with air but with debt from around the globe.