Sierra Madre Precious Metals

Last week we wrote about how global central banks have created an economic time machine by forcing $17 trillion worth of bond yields below zero percent, which is now 30% of the entire developed world’s supply. Now it’s time to explain how the time machine they have built has broken down… Continue reading →

The distinguishing feature of fiat money systems is that they are licentious—they are created by corrupt politicians so that they can act without restraint by, for example, promising the citizens the earth in order to improve their chances of being re-elected. The population can pick up the tab later in the form of devalued money that buys them less. The current dollar fiat money system was created by then President Richard Nixon in 1971, hardly an edifying character, and, thinking about it, it was very apt that it was him who created it by getting rid of the gold standard… Continue reading →

Most people who have undertaken a formal study of economics end up accepting such things as the necessity of a central bank to prevent or at least ameliorate recessions. They take as a given the need for government intervention in the economy, or if not as a given, as explained by countless historical incidents of injustice. Perhaps most of all, they regard anyone calling for an unregulated gold coin standard as so hopelessly backward and naive that refutation becomes a matter of rolling one’s eyes. Continue reading →

So there is a lot of buzz that the Federal Reserve is about to cut interest rates – and it might actually happen. We’ll see. But if it does happen, it will directly contradict the carefully crafted narrative about the economy that the Federal Reserve has been perpetuating all this time. Fed Chair Jerome Powell has repeatedly insisted that the U.S. economy is in great shape even when there has been a tremendous amount of evidence indicating otherwise. And of course President Trump has been repeatedly telling us that this is “the greatest economy in the history of our country”, but now he is loudly calling for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates as well. Something doesn’t seem to add up here. Continue reading →

Big Companies All Over America Are Reporting Disastrous Financial Results

If the U.S. economy really was “booming”, then corporate earnings would be rising. But that isn’t happening. In fact, we haven’t seen corporate earnings fall like this since the last recession. They fell during the first quarter of this year, and based on the results we have so far, it appears that corporate earnings will be down substantially once again in the second quarter. When corporate earnings drop for two quarters in a row, that is officially considered to be an “earnings recession”, and that normally occurs just before the overall economy plunges into recession territory. As things get tighter for our corporate giants, we should expect a lot more layoffs in the months ahead, and the unemployment rate should rise quite briskly. In other words, it looks like our economic problems are about to accelerate substantially. Continue reading →

Honest money is a widely-accepted medium of exchange that arises solely from voluntary market exchanges and maintains its value solely from voluntary market exchanges. People once settled on gold and silver coins as their preferred money, but we have long since been prohibited from using them. An employer who pays his employees by mutual consent in gold or silver coins is subject to prosecution from the guilty-until-proven-innocent IRS.

It would take a powerful criminal organization to prevent a nation of 320 million people from exercising their freedom to choose their own money, but that’s what has happened. Ironically, most people don’t consider this organization as criminal at all, but rather as necessary for the preservation and growth of civilization. Continue reading →

The American system has thrown them into debt, depressed their wages, kept them from buying homes—and then blamed them for everything.

When a staid American institution is declared dead, the news media like to haul the same usual suspect before the court of public opinion: the Millennial generation.

The 80 million–plus people born in the United States between the early 1980s and the late 1990s stand accused of assassinating various hallmarks of modern life. The list of the deceased includes golf, department stores, the McDonald’s McWrap, and canned tuna. Millennials tore up napkins, threw out mayonnaise, and mercifully disposed of divorce and Applebee’s before graduating to somewhat postmodern crimes: “Have Millennials Killed Serendipity?” With the national murder rate in long-term decline, it may even be said that Millennials are killing killing. Continue reading →

Our monetary system is broken. It’s given us low growth, a shrinking job force, inequality beyond what a healthy economy would produce, inefficiency, and the unnatural growth of finance as a portion of the economy. Our aging Federal Reserve System starves both small businesses and Silicon Valley of the capital needed to grow jobs and wages.

Fed policy translates into zero-interest-rate loans for the government and its cronies, and little or nothing for savers or small businesses. And it has transformed Wall Street from an engine of innovation into a servant of government power. Continue reading →