The information for this article is sourced directly from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services..
On the heels of the Social Security announcement of a 3.2% cost of living adjustment comes the official Medicare rates for 2024. As always a degree in finance would be helpful in understanding them. Continue reading
I write a lot about the national debt – And most people don’t care…
That’s because there’s a widespread belief that the dollar is invincible.
Photo by Kovalchuk Oleksandr/Shutterstock
Current economic indicators provide a mixed picture. On one hand, the country has experienced robust GDP growth, signaling a strong economy. The labor market remains tight with historically low unemployment rates, and job gains continue to be impressive. However, a persistent concern is elevated inflation, with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation at 3.7% and core inflation at 4.1%.
The Federal Reserve’s approach to curbing inflation is rooted in their belief that they can reduce it to 2% by 2026. Their primary focus is on wage inflation, which they intend to address by rebalancing the labor market. In other words, they anticipate that by reducing job opportunities, wage inflation will naturally decrease. Continue reading
With investors turning to gold to hedge against inflation the price of the precious metal could soon rise again.
Inflation has been high for quite some time. While the Federal Reserve has been actively trying to tame it, many consumers still feel the burn — struggling with higher prices, higher interest rates and more.
This has led to increased interest in gold investments, as many consider it a smart hedge against inflation and a good way to safeguard wealth in troubling economic times. Continue reading
We’re witnessing history: the first meaningful decline in U.S. money supply in 90 years.
Volatility has been the name of the game on Wall Street since this decade began. Since 2020, the iconic Dow Jones Industrial Average, broad-based S&P 500, and growth-focused Nasdaq Composite, have bounced back and forth between bear and bull markets.
These wild fluctuations have left investors to question what’s next for stocks. Although there isn’t any one indicator that can, with 100% accuracy, forecast what’s to come in the short run for Wall Street, there are quite a few economic datapoints that have an uncanny track record of predicting short-term directional movements in the Dow Jones, S&P 500, and Nasdaq Composite. One such metric that should be raising some eyebrows is U.S. money supply.
If you’re going to go out, you might as well go out in style. Our national debt stood at $31,467,639,287,894.39 at the start of June. It is now worth $33,476,530,987,617.43. That implies that in just three months, we have added nearly two trillion dollars to the national debt.
We are in debt trouble. Photo by Richelleg/canva
It is the largest single debt in our planet’s history, and it will never be paid off. Our debt spiral has reached its terminal point, and the only thing we can do now is prolong the suffering. We destroyed the beautiful future that our children and grandchildren were meant to have a long time ago, so what we do now doesn’t really matter.
History is starting to repeat itself. In 2008, bond prices crashed before stock prices did. Here in 2023, bond prices are crashing again. In fact, we are currently witnessing one of the greatest financial crashes in U.S. history at this moment. Of course most Americans have absolutely no idea that this is happening. Most Americans don’t know anything about the bond crash that is causing a tremendous amount of fear in the financial community right now, and that is because the big news networks aren’t talking about it too much. But it is serious. Since the peak of the market, 10 year bonds are DOWN 46 percent and 30 year bonds are DOWN 53 percent……
Losses on longer-dated Treasuries are beginning to rival some of the most notorious market meltdowns in US history. Continue reading
The gold market may not be able to break out of its neutral trading channel around $1,950 just yet, but it is well positioned to benefit when sentiment turns, which could be sooner than some are expecting. Continue reading
When Silicon Valley Bank and other banks failed earlier this year, the debate over the sustainability of fractional reserve banking resurfaced. Under fractional reserve banking, banks keep only a fraction of customers’ deposits in reserve. The difference is bank credit, such as government debt, mortgages, business loans, and many other kinds of loans. This practice leaves the bank open to a run, in which panicky depositors attempt to withdraw their funds from the bank en masse but the bank doesn’t have the cash on hand. Continue reading
Banks have now reported having more than $309 billion in unrealized losses for the second quarter ending on June 30 alone.
The FDIC reported that all 4,645 FDIC-insured financial institutions had $309.6 billion in unrealized losses on held-to-maturity securities.
According to Bank of America’s federal regulatory filing known as the Call Report, for the quarter ending June 30, 2023, it had $105.79 billion in unrealized losses on its held-to-maturity (HTM) securities, reports Wall Street on Parade. Continue reading
