Financial Sense Blog

I get a lot of email from readers. I recently got an impassioned letter from very-long-time reader Bill K., who asks some very pointed questions about austerity and spending cuts. It is a rather lengthy letter, so I will only quote part of it and use it is the launching pad for this week’s letter, where we look at today’s employment report, but from a little different slant. This letter will no doubt anger a few other long-time readers. I argue this week for the middle, but do so as a survivalist.

Civilian Unemployment Rate: 8.8% in March vs. 8.9% in February. Cycle high for recession is 10.1% in October 2009. Payroll Employment: +216,000 in March vs. +194,000 in February. Private sector jobs increased 230,000 after a gain of 240,000 in February. Revisions for January and Februay resulted in a net gain of 7,000 jobs in the economy. Private Sector Hourly Earnings: $22.87 in March, unchanged from February; 1.7% yoy increase in March vs. a similar gain in February.

History suggests there is a strong correlation between GDP per capita levels and oil consumption. If China catches up with the pace established by its Asian neighbors, it could wreak havoc on the global oil market.

Recently, the Obama Administration seemed to flash a rare sign of laissez-faire thinking when it issued a report calling for the "winding down" of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two taxpayer-guaranteed institutions now responsible for backing at least 90% of the US mortgage market. In its press release, the Administration acknowledged that the private sector should be the "primary source of mortgage credit," and that their goal is to "bring private capital back to the mortgage market."

While most investors are familiar with the Dollar Index, it is actually a poor tool in gauging the strength of the USD given its weightings and only being a six currency basket. To truly see how the greenback is performing on a global scale one needs to look at more than six currencies and include precious metals. When one does this it is truly amazing how much the purchasing power of the USD has declined since 2009 after two rounds of quantitative easing (QE), and it is this loss of purchasing power that has the potential to at least cause another growth scare like 2010 or even a bear market.

Global markets show many double bottoms. If nature abhors a vacuum, technicians abhor "V" bottoms. Once prices bounced out of the March lows, the technical expectation was that, after a week or two of rally, prices would turn down again and the March lows would be retested. At this point, those expectations seem to be a fading dream.

GFMS produced the report for the Silver Institute published last week. We have used this as a basis for this article on silver supply and demand in the last three years. Our objective in this piece is to have recent history confirm what we expect of the future for silver.

Right now, we’re in that weird in-between time of financial crises: The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 is behind us, while the next global crisis is not here yet—but it’s on its way.

It feels a little callous writing about Japan with respect to precious metals after the country suffered such a terrible tragedy. However, I think it’s worth discussing because there’s a lesson in it for all of us. In fact, I think the moral could be couched in terms of a warning.

While gold and silver coins are nice to look at, and there's a certain sense of independence one gets from owning them, most purchasers buy physical precious metals with the goal of eventually spending them. As they say, you can't take it with you.