The Money Bubble

a “complex” system like a weather front, living organism, or pre-avalanche snow-covered mountainside contains numerous parts that do change in response to their communication and interaction. This process can create feedback loops begetting “emergent properties” that differ radically from the system’s constituent parts or its previous state.

A handful of major banks sold gold futures contracts worth tens of billions of dollars on the Comex futures exchange, frequently at odd times when trading was thin. This pushed the “paper” price of gold through technical support levels, which activated sell programs of momentum-trading hedge funds. The resulting additional selling pressure forced g

The world’s governments thus find themselves in an ever-shrinking box. And all it will take to trigger the crisis is a return to historically-normal levels of interest rates. As recently as 2000, 30-year Treasury bonds yielded over 6 percent and 30-year mortgages cost 7.5 percent. Let rates return to those levels and the global financial system imp

Whereas a leveraged inverse bond ETF (one that is designed to go up if bonds go down) can only be held for short periods of time because it bleeds value, a short position in a leveraged long bond ETF (a fund designed to go down if bonds go down) can be held for years because its gradual loss of value works to the short seller’s advantage. So to bet

Today’s fiat currencies emphatically meet the above bubble criteria. The prices of government bonds denominated in euro, yen and dollars have risen to extraordinary levels (which is the same as saying interest rates have been forced to extraordinarily-low levels). And befitting its size and scope, this bubble is rationalized with two popular mantra

But because so many of the uses to which these borrowed funds were put turned out to be unwise or unprofitable, debt ended up growing faster than productive assets. This “malinvestment” left the country poorer than it would have been had the money never been borrowed.

The national mints generally sell to wholesalers who sell to dealers who sell to individuals, which can result in a fairly high mark-up at the retail level. So while there are advantages to owning well-recognized forms of bullion like gold eagles or maple leafs (for example, they often are easier to sell), our advice is to get the most metal for yo

Here again, the long volatility ETFs are strictly for short-term traders, but the inverse volatility funds offer the same kinds of advantages for long-term short-sellers as the leveraged bullish bond ETFs. Think it through: You expect volatility to go up, so you short, or bet against, the inverse funds that want volatility to go down.

To understand how the current system might spin out of control and where the unraveling might begin, look at where the complexity – aka systemic risk – is of late being concentrated most quickly. Post-2008, the two areas that stand out are government debt – which has been substituted for private debt as governments have borrowed unprecedented amoun

So in 2013 the industry adopted “all-in sustaining costs” as the preferred measure. As Chuck Jeannes, CEO of Canadian miner Goldcorp admitted in his company’s 2012 annual report, “The traditional measure of cash costs is not a realistic view. To produce an ounce of gold, we not only incur operating costs, but we spend sustaining capital at the site