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...

What’s the last big toy you buy when things have been good for a really long time and you already have all the other toys? An RV, of course. A dubious thing to own if you already have a house, but when the good times seem likely to roll on forever, why the hell not? And what’s the first thing yo...

If you study these charts closely, you can only conclude that the US economy is doomed to secular stagnation and never-ending recession. The stock market, bond yields and statistical measures of the economy can be gamed, manipulated and massaged by authorities, but the real economy cannot. This is e...

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...

“The world in which we live has an increasing number of feedback loops, causing events to be the cause of more events (say, people buy a book because other people bought it), thus generating snowballs and arbitrary and unpredictable planet-wide winner-take-all effects.” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb...

One mystery trader has made an extremely large bet that the stock market is going to crash by October, and if he is right he could potentially make up to 262 million dollars on the deal.  Fortunes were made and lost during the great financial crisis of 2008, and the same thing will happen again th...

Today’s release of the publicly available data from ECRI puts its Weekly Leading Index (WLI) at 144.8, up from the previous week. Year-over-year the four-week moving average of the indicator is now at 4.99%, down from 5.12% last week. The WLI Growth indicator is now at 2.6, up from the previo...

As we get into the midst of the Q2 earnings season, we can take a closer look at the results through the 1st quarter of the year. Despite the exuberance from the media over the “number of companies that beat estimates” during the most recent reported period, 12-month operating earnings per s...

A Potential Road Map for the End of the Current Bull Market & Economic Expansion History books refer to the last economic slowdown we experienced, triggered by the 2007-2008 financial crisis, as the Great Recession. Its impacts were so severe—the worst global recession since the Great Depress...

The gold-futures and silver-futures short positions held by speculators have rocketed up to extremes in recent weeks.  These elite traders are aggressively betting for further weakness in gold and silver prices.  But history has proven extreme shorts are a powerful contrarian indicator.  Right a...

On June 29, the Apple iPhone turned 10 years old. But, for many, the mood surrounding the milestone was less than celebratory. Reason being, in June alone, Apple Inc. (AAPL) plunged 6% to two-month lows amidst a broad-scale bruising of the global tech sector. And so, the cursor on some Smartphone s...

Speculators are running scared in the paper precious metals markets. And that’s a good thing. The past few months’ correction has finally led hedge funds and other technical/momentum traders to shed their long positions and load up on short bets. Meanwhile the Commercials, which tend to be right...

In Janet Yellen’s semi-annual testimony on Capitol Hill yesterday, she made reference to the ongoing strength of employment as one of the reasons for continuing to “normalize” monetary policy by lifting interest rates and reducing the existing bond holdings of the Federal Reserve. To wit: ...

Did you know that the federal government is going to spend more than 4 trillion dollars this year?  To put that into perspective, U.S. GDP for the entire year of 2017 is going to be somewhere between 18 and 19 trillion dollars.  So when you are talking about 4 trillion dollars you are talking abou...

The fragility of our financial buffers will only be revealed when they fail in the next crisis. While buffer has a specific meaning in chemistry, I am using the word in the broad sense of a reserve resource that absorbs the initial destructive impacts of crises or system overloads. Marshland alon...

The stars — in the form of smart and dumb money futures contract positions — have once again lined up favorably for precious metals. Here are those positions for gold and silver as of Tuesday the 4th. Notice that speculators (the dumb money) got a lot less optimistic — that is, less long and m...