The Money Bubble

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

Japan is the world’s most rapidly-aging nation. To cite just one of many extraordinary data points, in 2012 its citizens bought more diapers for adults than for children.

The Fear Index is useful to measure gold’s true value. The Index’s average over the near-century covered in the above chart is 7.09 percent, compared to 2.27 percent in late 2013, which indicates that gold is undervalued. To return to the ‘norm’ – perhaps not the right word since most of the data measures an era of fiat currency – that this histori

the Federal Reserve issued up to 2½-times more receipts than gold

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

Ludwig von Mises, a pioneer in the Austrian School of economics, called this sudden loss of faith in a fiat currency a “crack-up boom,” and historically it has spelled the end of the currency in question.

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

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

organizations are suffering from “peak complexity,” a concept crucial to understanding the recent evolution – and coming difficulties – of the broader economy.