What awaits us

By Doug Noland 11/16/2019 We shouldn’t read too much into one month. With a holiday week, October is typically a sluggish period for lending in China. But at $88 billion, the growth in Aggregate Financing was about a third below estimates. It was also the weakest month in years – running about a third of September’s level and 16% below a slow [...] Read more

By Doug Noland 11/ 09/2019 M2 money supply has increased $796 billion y-t-d to $15.245 TN. With two months to go, 2019 M2 growth is on track to easily exceed 2016’s record $854 billion expansion. Recent M2 growth is nothing short of spectacular. M2 has jumped $329 billion in ten weeks, about an 11.5% annualized pace. Over 26 weeks, M2 surged $677 [...] Read more

By Egon von Greyerz 10/ 17/2019 “Sic Transit Gloria Mundi” (Thus passes the glory of the world). This phrase was used at the papal coronations between the early 1400s and 1963. It was meant to indicate the transitory or ephemeral nature of life and cycles. As we are now facing the end of a major economic, political and cultural cycle, the world is [...] Read more

Golden Bridge on Ba Na Hills, Danang, Vietnam. By Justina Vasquez and Elena Mazneva, with assistance from Ranjeetha Pakiam, Bloomberg News 10/25/2019 Gold futures pared their weekly gain on Friday as progress in the US-Chinese trade talks weighed against weaker-than-expected U.S. data that reinforced expectations the Federal Reserve will cut [...] Read more

By Doug Noland 10/26/2019 Any central bank head that passes through an eight-year term without once raising rates has some explaining to do. To leave monetary policy extremely loose for such an extended period comes with major consequences (can we at least agree on that?). So, what went wrong? How did policy measures not operate as expected? With [...] Read more

BY JOHN RUBINO 10/24/2019 The gold market has a saying — “sell in May and go away” – for a good reason: Asians like to give gold jewelry as wedding gifts and tend to hold most of their weddings in the Spring. Asian jewelers therefore have to load up on inventory – in the form of gold bullion – in winter. This demand cycle puts upward pressure on [...] Read more

By Mish 10/24/2019 The Fed announced today it would increase "Overnight" repos to $120 billion. Please consider a Statement Regarding Repurchase Operations from the New York Fed moments ago. The Desk has released an update to the schedule of repurchase agreement (repo) operations for the current monthly period. Consistent with the most recent FOMC [...] Read more

By Jordan Roy-Byrne, The Daily Gold 10/22/2019 Precious Metals enjoyed a very strong move this past summer. Both Gold and gold stocks broke past multi-year resistance and showed the kind of positive momentum that has been lacking for years. But strong momentum coupled with major technical resistance set in, along with a temporary shift in [...] Read more

By Doug Noland 10/20/2019 I’ve held the view that Chinese finance has been at the epicenter of international market unease. The U.S./China trade war was not the predominant global risk. However, it has had the potential to become a catalyst for Chinese financial instability. And there remains a high probability for an eruption of Chinese disorder [...] Read more

By Peter Schiff, Euro Pacific Capital 10/18/2019 Rene Magritte’s 1929 painting “The Treachery of Images,” depicts a tobacco pipe with a caption that reads “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” (French for “This is not a pipe”). Everyone who has taken a course in modern art knows that Magritte’s exercise in contradiction was meant to draw a distinction [...] Read more