The UK’s Telegraph just published an analysis of global debt that pretty much sums up the coming crisis. Here’s an excerpt with a couple of the more hair-raising charts: Global debt explodes at ‘eye-watering’ pace to hit £170 trillion Global debt has climbed at an “eye-watering” pace o...

Here is a summary of the four market valuation indicators we update on a monthly basis. The Crestmont Research P/E Ratio (more) The cyclical P/E ratio using the trailing 10-year earnings as the divisor (more) The Q Ratio, which is the total price of the market divided by its replacement cost (more...

Gold suffered heavy selling in early March leading into the Fed’s latest rate hike.  Speculators frantically dumped gold futures ahead of the Fed’s meeting as implied rate-hike odds soared.  This is nothing new.  This key group of traders has long feared Fed-rate-hike cycles, convinced they a...

For a while there it looked like the US and its main trading partners had finally achieved escape velocity. Growth was up, inflation was poking through the Fed’s 2% target, and most measures of consumer sentiment were bordering on euphoric. Then it all started to evaporate. Lackluster manufacturin...

Like an old vinyl record with a well-worn groove, the needle skipping merrily back to the same track over and over again, we repeat: Today’s markets are dangerously overpriced. Being market fundamentalists who don’t believe it’s possible to simply print prosperity out of thin air, we’ve ...

The month of March typically marks the beginning of Spring. This weekend will also mark the loss of an hour of sleep as we set our clocks forward an hour in observance of daylight savings time. As we will discuss momentarily, the month of March begins following an unseasonably warm winter period tha...

  The ninth largest economy in the entire world is currently experiencing “its longest and deepest recession in recorded history”, and in a country right next door people are being encouraged to label their trash so that the thousands upon thousands of desperately hungry people that are di...

I received an email last week which I thought was worth discussing. “I just found your site and began reading the backlog of posts on the importance of managing risk and avoiding draw downs. However, the following chart would seem to counter that argument. In the long-term, bear markets seem harm...

I have a simple question… If the rally in the market that began following the election was pricing in the expectations for tax reforms, repatriation, building the wall, and infrastructure spending, then what did the rally on Wednesday following Trump’s speech to Congress price in? With the mar...

One of the traditional signs of market tops is individual investors finally succumbing to the lure of apparently easy money and pouring their savings into the stock market. In the past this dumb money flowed into equity mutual funds in general. But today it’s favoring exchange traded funds (ETFs) ...

Here is a summary of the four market valuation indicators we update on a monthly basis. The Crestmont Research P/E Ratio (more) The cyclical P/E ratio using the trailing 10-year earnings as the divisor (more) The Q Ratio, which is the total price of the market divided by its replacement cost (more...

Economic data for February provided clear indications that the global economy is experiencing a broad recovery, with the major advanced economies growing close to or even above their estimated potential growth rates. This positive macroeconomic environment is providing a tailwind for equity markets...

In the past, I’ve warned about the coming Great Wealth Transfer.  But now we need to talk about it in the present tense, because it’s here. And it will only accelerate from here on out. The Rich will get richer at the expense of everybody else. This isn’t personal. It’s simply ...

In every annual budget debate since the 1980s, one side figures out that the way to get what it wants – which is higher spending – is to frame the request in a particular, ingenious way: We have to borrow and spend way more now if we want to borrow and spend way less later. History has of course...

The gold stocks enjoyed a strong surge early this year, fully reversing their sharp post-election losses.  While they spent much of February consolidating before sliding, this sector’s seasonals will soon turn very favorable again in mid-March.  The gold miners have long enjoyed strong spring ra...

For more than 100 years global debt levels have been rising, and now we are potentially facing the greatest debt crisis in all of human history.  Never before have we seen such a level of debt saturation all over the planet, and pretty much everyone understands that this is going to end very, very ...