Most investors know that over 90% of the New York Stock Exchange and other exchange trading is done by robots, not people. These are not just electronic order matching systems for individual trades; those have been around since the 1990s. These are actual robots that make the trading decisions and decide when to enter trades
A Chinese financial and economic crisis has been in the forecasts of many analysts for years, including my own. So far, it has not happened. Does this mean China has solved the problem of how to avoid a crisis? Or is the crisis just a matter of time, set to happen sooner than later? My
A large number of China analysts are concluding that growth in China is slower than the official government reports. In fact, growth is even worse than the pessimists imagine. The statistics on Chinese GDP growth for the fourth quarter of 2018 and the full-year have been widely reported. Quarterly growth was 6.4% (annualized), the lowest
Since the end of QE and the “taper” in October 2014, the Fed has been trying to “normalize” their balance sheet and interest rates. The balance sheet needed to be reduced from $4.5 trillion to about $2.5 trillion through “quantitative tightening” or QT, which is tantamount to burning money. To read the rest of this
Wars are raging all over the world, yet relatively few are traditional shooting wars. Most are financial wars involving banks, payment systems, capital markets and gold. The latest example of a financial war is described in this article. The U.S. is in a complicated financial war with Venezuela. The U.S. has placed an embargo on
What’s the safest way to store physical gold bullion? Most investors would say that the safest place is in a bank vault. Most would agree that the one place safer than a bank vault would be a central bank vault. What could be safer? As this article shows, both answers are incorrect. Banks are controlled by the government. Central
Conventional wisdom says that ease by the Federal Reserve is good for business and tightening by the Fed is a head wind for business. But there’s nothing conventional about the financial environment we’re living in today. The fact is raising rates may be a positive if business is thriving, growth is strong and companies are
In recent weeks, I have distributed articles describing plans by Democratic presidential hopefuls Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders to increase income taxes to 70% or even 90% on the rich, impose “wealth taxes” on their net worth and impose estate taxes that are equally onerous when they die. The result would be that
My views on the cryptocurrency market are fairly well known. I’ve been in one crypto debate after another for the past six years. Most of these have been crypto versus gold, but not all. In order not to lose these debates, I had to become an expert in cryptos so I didn’t get run over
An 11-year monetary experiment is coming to an end in failure. No one knows what happens next, but the need to position portfolios to preserve wealth has never been greater. The experiment began in the midst of the financial panic of 2008 when the Fed began printing money under a program called “quantitative easing,” or
