Protect Your Future Today
Many Americans put money into their retirement accounts and never bother doing anything more than briefly looking through their annual statements. They are the very definition of passive investors. But in the event of a market crash, those passive investors will lose significant amounts of their savings. Given that...
Retirement accounts of American workers have benefited greatly this year from the stock market’s successes. Many nearing retirement age are undoubtedly viewing their portfolios happily and making plans for how they’re going to use all that money. But with dark clouds of a financial crisis on the horizon and...
Nearly a decade after the financial crisis, American workers are still facing financial difficulties. Rather than getting better, their financial situation is actually deteriorating. Nearly 78% of full-time workers report that they live paycheck to paycheck, up from 75% last year. And 71% of all workers report that they...
The Phillips Curve is an economic concept that posits a stable and inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment. As inflation rises, unemployment falls, and vice versa. Many free market economists had thought that the Phillips Curve had already died in the aftermath of the stagflation of the 1970s when...
Analysts at a number of large banks are warning of an economic downturn. Their warnings are based on observations of various technical data, none of which look very rosy. One of Morgan Stanley’s chief strategists has noted a breakdown in the correlation of the prices of various assets. Higher correlations...
In the aftermath of the failure of the post-war Bretton Woods monetary system, the dollar’s position as the world’s reserve currency was strengthened by the development of the petrodollar system. Middle Eastern oil-producing countries agreed to price their oil in dollars, accept only dollars as payment for oil, and...
The German government finished its planned repatriation of gold holdings by transferring the last bars held at the Banque de France in Paris back to Germany. The German government’s plan was to hold at least 50% of its gold within Germany, a task which has now been completed through...
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin recently visited the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox. According to Bloomberg, Mnuchin stated that “The last time anybody went in to see the gold, other than the Fort Knox people, was in 1974 when there was a congressional visit. And the last time...
In what will likely come as a shock to many investors, the price to earnings ratio of the companies in the Russell 2000 index of small-cap stocks has been shown to be much higher than normally reported. Most publications that report the Russell 2000’s P/E ratio apparently fail to...
Housing prices in Denver, Houston, Miami, and the Washington, DC metropolitan area are officially considered overvalued. While that’s probably not news to the people who live in those areas, it’s yet more evidence that the housing market in the United States is reaching, if not already well into, bubble...