The past year was a difficult one overall for the metals, with the main standouts to the upside being a geopolitical risk-driven gain in gold, a China-driven rise in iron ore and a surge in uranium on broadening global support for nuclear power (Figure 1). A jump in global interest rates to near two-decade highs saw recession fears persist all year, and while one still did not actually eru...Read More

This year the post-global health crisis boom was brought to an end by a surge in inflation to forty-year highs, a major rise in global interest rates in an attempt to curb the rising prices and surging geopolitical risk after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. While precious metals held up reasonably well as markets turned to them as a risk hedge, by Q2/22 the higher interest rates put an end t...Read More

Chile is the world leader in copper production, at 28.5% of the total in 2020, and this looks set to continue, with the country having the largest global reserves, at 23.0% of total. It is also the global leader for molybdenum, which is often found along with copper, and is a major lithium player, holding 51.1% of global reserves. Read More

Newfoundland has become a gold exploration hotspot over the past few years, with the sector seeing some of its strongest activity ever. While the province remains a small contributor to Canadian gold production, it has a substantial mineral industry well supported by the government, focused on iron ore, copper and nickel, and the surge in exploration suggests that gold output from the...Read More

Nevada is the core of the U.S. gold output, accounting for by far the majority, at 75.4% on average for the past year. The state looks set to remain a dominant player in U.S. gold, as it accounts for 49% of total U.S. reserves, with Alaska slightly ahead with 51% of reserves, but just 8.6% of current production. The U.S. accounts for 6.1% of global gold output, making Nevada one of the largest gol...Read More

The Golden Triangle in northwestern British Columbia has historically been a major site of Canadian gold production, beginning as early as the mid 1800s. There was a wave of production in the 1990s which cooled as the gold price declined, but larger scale production resumed in 2017, and the area has seen surging exploration interest over the past year, given that the region has some of the largest...Read More

In this report we outline the Quebec gold mining industry, including its major producers, and a survey of many of the junior miners focused on the province. Quebec accounts for 34% of Canadian gold production (second to Ontario, with 44%) and remains a major focus for both producers and junior miners.Read More

Red Lake has been one of the most prolific gold mining districts in Canada and the world, with exploration having started in the 1920s, and production, which began in the 1930s, continuing to the present day. The district is known for the high grade of its gold, its infrastructure, and strong institutional support, given the long history of mining in the area.Read More

This past weekend, Donald Trump spoke at the Libertarian Party's national convention. The media are gloating that the crowd booed Trump at times.But the fact that they gave Trump a cool reception shouldn't come as a surprise. Many libertarians (though not all) are for open borders. Trump wants a border wall. Libertarians doctrinally support unfettered free trade, while Trump believes in tariffs to...Read More

It is Memorial Day... when we pause to honor the nation's war dead.Most Americans will not, of course.It merely represents a chance to lie flat on a beach... to munch frankfurters... to dream the tall dreams of approaching summer.We will be among them.We will not be planting tiny American flags atop forgotten graves today.We will not be bugling taps.It is unlikely we will thank a veteran for his s...Read More

The sitting administration the Biden administration sobs about inflation.It claims it labors... heart and soul... to reduce that inflation.Yet we believe these tears are the crocodile's tears. That is, these tears are not authentic.We believe the administration is not heart and soul to reduce inflation.The administration is rather heart and soul for inflation. Not hyperinflation, mind you hy...Read More

We can summarize the changes in our economy over the past two generations with one word: precarity, as life for the bottom 90% of American households has become far more precarious over the past 40 years, despite the rising GDP and “wealth” as measured in phantom capital.This reality is expressed in the portmanteau word precariat, combining proletariat (someone whose livelihood comes f...Read More

A book that pays high returns for decades with endless insights is Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942).It's not a systematic treatise. It's more of a series of observations about huge problems that vexed those times and ours. Many are informed by economics. Some by history. Some by sociology and culture.Schumpeter was a partisan of the old-school bourgeois order educat...Read More

For the past two years, I've been warning about the emergence of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), or as I like to call the U.S. version, "Biden Bucks."Can good old-fashioned American federalism stop them? We'll consider that possibility today.If you're a new reader who isn't familiar with Biden Bucks, or an existing reader who could use a reminder, the Biden administration is planning to c...Read More

The bulls continue their unstoppable run as stocks launch higher once again this week.The major averages are all fresh off new highs - and the US indexes aren't the only names on the list.In fact, 14 of the world's 20 largest stock markets have recently logged all-time highs, gushed Bloomberg shortly after the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 40,000 for the first time Friday afternoon. Ot...Read More

The miasma of anxiety befogging so many brains in our troubled land begins to lift as every narrative served up by the US fascist intel blob goes annoyingly stale and impotent.The worst media meme that a vicious officialdom is "defending our democracy" gets laughed out of the room now when repeated incessantly by such regime shills as Jen Psaki and Lawrence O'Donnell of MSNBC.Everybody underst...Read More

I believe that we're heading for another liquidity crisis or financial crisis. That doesn't mean it'll happen tomorrow, but there are disturbing signs that it might not be too far off.It doesn't mean the world's going to end. But investors who aren't prepared could see large portions of their portfolios wiped out. It could take years to rebuild them, and many investors just don't have the time to...Read More

It's not been good lately for the Censorship Industrial Complex.The machine has been built and put into action over nearly a decade but largely in secret. Its way of doing business has been via surreptitious contacts with media and tech companies, intelligence carve-outs in "fact-checking" organizations, payoffs, and various other clever strategies, all directed toward boosting some sources of inf...Read More

Wall Street expects an "immaculate acceleration."Bloomberg's Mr. Simon White:The economy is signaling a more volatile, potentially recessionary period. Markets, however, aren't paying attention. Not only are the twin tail risks of a downturn or resurgent inflation being ignored, but a near-impossible "immaculate acceleration" of boomy growth and benign price appreciation is becoming the base case....Read More

There has been a lot reported in recent days about the return of currency wars. This story arises in the context of a likely Trump election victory in the November presidential elections.Trump badly bungled his transition after first being elected president in 2016. He wasn’t ready with a long list of loyal appointees.Many of his senior appointments such as Rex Tillerson as secretary of stat...Read More

As I watch from afar, I wonder how Americans can take it. Seriously, American taxpayer largesse pays for untold amounts of charity, though it's coerced from them through tax. I don't know who said it, but he was right: the profits of capitalism pay for the follies of socialism.How do we measure such things?It seems that deficits still don't matter to most; in fact, too many people profit from them...Read More

Moore's Law: the theory that computational power doubles every other year.In brief, that computational power accelerates at an accelerating rate an exponential rate.We begin to suspect that a sort of social Moore's law is in effect.That is, that societal change is accelerating at an accelerating rate.This directional movement we hesitate to label it progress is likely the child of technologi...Read More

Just when you thought trading couldn't get any crazier, meme stocks have suddenly reappeared - along with some of the more prominent speculators from the Covid Bubble era."Roaring Kitty" - the infamous trader who made a killing by starting the grassroots short-squeeze movement that gave birth to some of the wildest runs in stock market history - suddenly reappeared on Twitter/X late Sunday followi...Read More

I've previously said that gold could reach $15,000 by 2026. Today, I'm updating that forecast.My latest forecast is that gold may actually exceed $27,000.I don't say that to get attention or to shock people. It's not a guess; it's the result of rigorous analysis.Of course, there's no guarantee it'll happen. But this forecast is based on the best available tools and models that have proved accurate...Read More

Fascism became a swear word in the U.S. and the U.K. during the Second World War. It's been ever since, to the point that the content of the term has been drained away completely. It's not a system of political economy but an insult.If we go back a decade before the war, you find a completely different situation. Read any writings from polite society from 1932-1940 or so and you find a consensus t...Read More

AI is like the powerful character in an action movie who looks invincible until they turn around, revealing a fatal spear embedded in their back.The spear in AI’s back is the American legal system, which has been issuing free passes to tech companies and platforms for decades on the idea that limiting innovation will hurt economic growth, so we’d best let tech companies run with few re...Read More

If you're under the age of about 60, you've never experienced stagflation. Back in the '70s, everyone experienced what happened and people spoke openly about it. The term itself "stagflation" was a shorthand term to describe what was clearly and painfully a broad, national economic unwind.Throughout the decade, the rate of inflation crept up and people saw it in daily life. Food became more ex...Read More

Here is a run of recent headlines:"Is the United States on the Verge of Stagflation?"…"It’s Looking More and More Like Stagflation"…"Stagflation Fears Come Back With a Vengeance"…"The U.S. Economy May Be Barrelling Toward Stagflation, an Outcome Worse Than Recession"…"JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon Can't Shake the Worry America Is Headed for a Repeat of 1970s-Style Stagflatio...Read More