Precious metals expert Michael Ballanger examines market forces and outlines his trades for the first part of the year.
I was listening to a news report on CNN yesterday covering this travesty surrounding the impending exit of Barack Obama and wife Michelle from the White House and as the commentator described the sequence of events leading up to the January 20th arrival of Mr. Donald J. Trump, you could detect a sense of melancholy in his voice, a faint trace of sadness, of loss, of hopelessness. And I was immediately taken back to the 1960s and the days of Walter Cronkite whose on-air persona was clipped and professional with the only emotion ever observed was when he had to announce the death of JFK in 1963. Those were the days when news was what reporters reported, when news was real, and when markets were free.
Fifty years later, we have CNBC commentators commenting on their “interest rate models” (when the only models of which they are qualified to speak are the ones in the window of Macy’s) and news anchors sounding off on something DJT tweeted or the “safe space” of some liberal arts university being invaded by insult-wielding Trumpladites.
I used to think my father got grumpier as he got older but he really didn’t; he simply grew less tolerant of the things he deemed “idiotic.” That is where I find myself as we roll into 2017 with global markets flirting with record highs despite record debt: GDP levels and borrowing costs on the rise. I am becoming less tolerant of all of the garbage spewed at us in order to make us believe that markets are fine, economies are growing, and gold is a barbarous relic of a bygone era.
However, I have to constantly remind myself of the old …read more