By David HaggithHow inflated with debt have we become? How long can we float on our own bloat? Reasonably trim in 1970, the sum of all debt publicly financed by the US government was $275 billion. Last week, the government sought to raise $258 billion in just one week! The weekly financing to keep the government afloat is now about equal to all the debt it amassed over the course of its first 18...Read More

A popular thesis since the 1930s is that a natural progression exists from currency wars to trade wars to shooting wars. Both history and analysis support this thesis.Continue...Read More

By John Mauldin'80s FlashbackData from AfarNot TheoreticalSome Thoughts on the Trump TariffsSan Diego and the Strategic Investment ConferenceI'm going to wrap up our series on the problems of collecting and analyzing data in the first half of this letter, and then I'll quickly comment on the Trump tariffs. I think both topics will feature in this week's Strategic Investment Conference. At the en...Read More

Now that equities are behaving the way they should have since, oh, 2013 - volatile with a pronounced down bias - everyone is wondering how far the crazy will go before the Fed starts buying the S&P 500.Short sellers, of course, want to know when to close out their at-long-last-profitable bets (see David Einhorn). Cautious investors (see Warren Buffett) with money on the sidelines want to know wh...Read More

The United States Army M1 Abrams tank, an American third-generation main battle tank, is being upgraded with an invisible shield that will destroy all chemical Continue...Read More

Goldmoney's Head of Research, Alasdair Macleod, shares his thoughts on the Oil-Yuan Futures and the implications for gold. Read More

"I've known Bob Mueller for 20, 30 years; my guess is he's just trying to make the case as good as he possibly can. So, I think that we have to be patient in that regard," Continue...Read More

By Dave KranzlerDr. Paul Craig Roberts sent me an article by Catherine Austin Fitts and asked if I had read it. The article is titled, "The State of America's Pension Funds." The article is worth reading, though I believe Ms. Fitts underestimates significantly the degree to which political and Wall Street criminality - along with money management incompetence - has infected and destroyed the U...Read More

By Gary SavageThis video details my longer term projections for numerous markets including the Nasdaq Index, Semiconductor Index, SPX 500, Commodities Index and Gold.https://blog.smartmoneytrackerpremium.com/ Read More

David Morgan of The Morgan Report spoke to INN at PDAC 2018 and discussed why Silver is going to outperform Gold this year. David Morgan is a world-renown precious metals aficionado. He is the creator of TheMorganReport.com, a monthly report that covers economic news, overall financial health of the global economy, currency problems and the key reasons for investing in precious metals. A dynamic,...Read More

Gold rose on Friday as the very real possibility of a global trade war took hold of the markets to end the weekContinue...Read More

Prices in the global steel billet market continued climbing in the week ended Friday March 2 as market factors supported the upward trend.One of the major factors was the surge in domestic billet prices in China after the week-long lunar new year holiday.Steady growth in import scrap prices in Turkey was another supportive factor for the global billet market.Metal Bulletin's daily index for Northe...Read More

Commander Resources (TSX-V: CMD) announced today that Fjordland Exploration (TSX.V: FEX) will fund a $1.2 million exploration program on the company's South Voisey's Bay nickel-copper-cobalt project, located in northeastern Canada.The 29,400-hectare property is located in central Labrador, 80 kilometres south of Vale's Voisey's Bay Nickel mine. It covers parts of the Pants Lake Gabbro Complex.In a...Read More

New research published in Nature Communications reveals that manganese has a novel chemical state. According to the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, this new state enables a high-performance, low-cost sodium-ion battery that could quickly and efficiently store and distribute energy produced by solar panels and wind turbines across the electrical grid.The idea of t...Read More

RAPAPORT...Firestar Diamond and its affiliates, following their bankruptcy filing in the wake of fraud allegations against their ultimate owner Nirav Modi, have reportedsignificant interest from companies looking to buy their operations.The three jewelers - Firestar, A. Jaffe and Fantasy - are seeking an infusion of capital or a sale, and intendto continue business as normal in the meantime,their...Read More

RAPAPORT... J.C. Penney's comparable-store jewelry sales jumped by atleast 10% in the fourth fiscal quarter, rounding off a strong year of growth,CEO Marvin Ellison said. Jewelry sales increased by that key measure in every quarterof the fiscal year ending February 3, including by a "double-digit" percentage inthe final three months, the executive noted. Jewelry was one of a handful of department...Read More

The Mexican steel association, Canacero, has called on the federal government to take "reciprocal measures" against the United States if it imposes a 25% duty on steel imports from Mexico. "Canacero expresses concern and it expects immediate reciprocal measures from our government if our country is included in the [232] measures," the association said late on Thursday March 1.The US recorded a ste...Read More

RAPAPORT... Helzberg Diamonds has appointed Ellen Junger as chief marketingofficer, and named Carmichael Lynch as its new ad agency of record. Junger was previously chief customer and marketing officerfor Payless ShoeSource. She has also worked for Hallmark Cards, including as chief marketing officer of Hallmark Canada, according to a statement on Carmichael's website. "Ellen brings a wealth of ex...Read More

Vietnamese re-rollers are fretting over a 25% import tariff that the United States is set to impose on steel imports, expecting them to reduce the volumes of finished flat products that they can ship there, market sources told Metal Bulletin on Friday March 2.This could in turn result in a supply glut of flat steel in Asia, they warned."Vietnamese re-rollers are growing increasingly worried and th...Read More

RAPAPORT...The Civil Society Coalition (CSC) of the Kimberley Process(KP) has appointed the Zimbabwe Environmental Law Association (ZELA) as its leader, according to a statement on the KP website. ZELA will take over the leadership from Impact - formerly Partnership AfricaCanada -which left the Kimberley Process in December, claiming the organization wasineffective in policing the diamond supply c...Read More