Consumer credit growth has been trending down since July – but grew this month. It is interesting that student loan growth has not been distorting one’s view of the consumer credit growth as the rate of growth is now slightly decelerating. Overall, consumer credit is growing at roughly double GDP growth and repayment of consumer debt…
Gold rose on Friday ahead of a closely watched U.S. jobs report and the metal was set to post its first gain in four weeks thanks to safe-haven bids amid political uncertainty in Greece plus robust Chinese demand. Spot gold ticked up 0.3 percent to $1,212.21 an ounce by 0308 GMT but it was below a…
What will you accept as real–your intuition that something is deeply amiss in America, or the official propaganda that all is well? In 1967, the rock group Buffalo Springfield recorded a song titled For What It’s Worth which speaks not just to the late 1960s but to the present. Consider the opening lines: There’s something happening here…
2014 was a year of divergence for the two major types of pass-through income stocks. Real estate investment trusts – REITs – had a great year, with the Dow Jones REIT index posting a 32.4% total return for the year. The other class of income stocks, master limited partnerships – MLPs – was hit by…
At the recent Web Summit in Dublin, I caught up with Moe Levin, Director of European Business Development atBitPay, an American company that provides payment services for the peer-to-peer virtual currency Bitcoin. Levin, who has organised Bitcoin conventions in North America and Europe, told me the latter is by far BitPay’s fastest-growing market for merchants adopting…
QUESTION: Dear Mr. Armstrong, Thank you for the amazing information you provide so freely. I have been trying to warn friends & family about the bond bubble that you have identified. It’s easy enough to explain why international capital flows are pushing the USD and bond market higher, but I am having trouble explaining WHY the…
’Tis the season for making forecasts. I will be sending my own five-year projections this weekend, but today for your Outside the Box reading pleasure we look at some similarly longer-term prognostications from the newest member of the Mauldin Economics writing team, Jawad Mian. Jawad writes a monthly global macro advisory publication called Stray Reflections, which…
The mainstream media narrative – that Germany is ready and prepared for Grexit and that it is no longer a threat to financial stability – is all hype, according to German opposition finance minister Joachim Poss. As Bloomberg reports, all that is mostly posturing for an electorate tired of the aid and angst Greece has demanded since 2010. Simply put,…
Among all the public health threats, there is no question that antibiotic resistance champions the list. The problem of antibiotic use is paradoxical because the only treatment for some of the most deadly hospital associated infections (e.g., MRSA) is antibiotics, which, in turn, exacerbate resistance. Antibiotic resistance occurs when a bacteria loses sensitivity to a…
2015 has gotten off to some wild swings, to say the least. The past 2 days (4th and 5th day of a New Year) have been the strongest since 1950, pushing the S&P 500 up 2.97%. This comes on the heels of the S&P getting off to the third worst start in 65 years…
