With so much focus on bitcoin lately, we’ve added a new weekly update that tracks the three largest cryptocurrencies by market share: bitcoin, Ether, and Ripple. According to Wikipedia, a cryptocurrency is “a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange that uses cryptography t...

Friday’s commitment of traders (COT) report for gold and silver offered more of the same. Which is to say the gold futures action was boring and the silver action was strange and exciting. Starting with gold, the large speculators – who, remember, tend to be wrong at big turning points – got a...

There is a very good chance we witnessed the top in bitcoin when it hit just under $20,000 in December of 2017. The rapid price gains it achieved last year officially put it in the record books as the largest bubble ever recorded, exceeding even the Tulip Mania of 1634-1637.   With the amount of a...

“Wild” doesn’t begin to describe Bitcoin’s price action. Less than 12 months ago, it traded as low as $1,200. By early December, it hit a high of $19,891 – and on the CBOE, Bitcoin futures topped $20,000. Then, on December 22, Bitcoin crashed to $10,400… then rebounded as...

After what seems like a decade in the shadow of tech stocks and cryptocurrencies, gold and silver are rocking again. Which of course leaves everyone wondering if this is the beginning of the long-awaited epic run, or just a head fake preceding yet another grinding, protracted, soul-sucking decline. ...

There’s a debate raging over what, exactly, bitcoin and the thousand or so other cryptocurrencies actually are. Some heavy-hitters are weighing in with strong, if not always coherent opinions: Jamie Dimon calls bitcoin a ‘fraud’ JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon did not mince words when asked abo...

Those who see governments banning ownership of bitcoin are ignoring the political power and influence of those who are snapping up most of the bitcoin. To really understand an asset, we have to examine not just the asset itself but who owns it, and who can afford to own it. These attributes will ...

Stocks are at record highs while volatility is at a record low. Which is another way of saying that investors aren’t as worried as they probably should be about the coming year. That’s okay. Price corrections (with their attendant volatility spikes) are normal and natural ways for markets to te...

Moves in the Japanese yen have been a reliable indicator for gold due to the effects of the yen carry trade. Given ultra-low interest rates in Japan, its currency has been the funding currency for global speculators who borrow in cheap yen and then speculate in other assets. When the yen weakens, th...

The late stages of financial bubbles are always tough for rational analysts. Focused as they are on the numbers, such analysts are relatively immune to the emotion that drives the action at market extremes, so they find themselves making predictions that turn out to be “wrong” for months and som...

Gold mining stocks have been treading water for what seems like forever. But in a remote part of Australia, a potentially big find by a tiny exploration company is generating some welcome excitement. The story in a nutshell: Back in the 1990s, Newmont Mining geologist Quinton Hennigh came up with a ...

The real demand for bitcoin will not be known until a global financial crisis guts confidence in central banks and politicized capital controls. I’ve been writing about cryptocurrencies and bitcoin for many years. For example: Could Bitcoin Become a Global Reserve Currency? (November 7, 201...

This week we talk with Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com, and rare courageous voice within corporate America raising concern that powerful interests on Wall Street are destroying US companies for profit, robbing investors and destabilizing our financial system in the process. Byrne has been an e...

The dollar has been falling lately, which isn’t what a lot of people expected with the Fed being the only major central bank that’s raising interest rates. Higher yields on dollar balances should, according to basic economics, have attracted foreign capital to Treasury paper, thus putting upward...

For an in-depth discussion of blockchain and cryptocurrencies see the June 2017 white paper published by the World Economic Forum: “Realizing the Potential of Blockchain: A Multistakeholder Approach to the Stewardship of Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies” (www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Realizing_Pote...

One of the crucial things to understand about today’s world is that money is fungible. Whether it’s created in Japan, Europe, China or the US, once it’s tossed by a central bank into one or another part of the global economy, it eventually finds its way to a common pool of liquidity. So the mo...