Precious metals have posted their best quarter in nearly 30 years and mining stocks are soaring from oversold multi-year lows. Those that were willing to buy when everyone else was selling have been handsomely rewarded in 2016 but we believe the gains are just getting started. In fact, gold would need to climb to somewhere around $3,000 per ounce to match the gains that gold experienced after bouncing from its prior bottoms and silver would need to climb towards $75 per ounce.

To most people, a depression means '30s-style conditions, and since they don't see that, they can't imagine a depression. That's because they know what the last depression was like, but they don't know what one is. It's hard to visualize something you don't understand...Nobody can predict with absolute certainty what this depression will be like...[but one] can be fairly well-assured it won't be an instant replay of the last one...To define the likely differences between this depres­sion and the last one, it's helpful to compare the situa­tion today to that in the early 1930s. The results aren't very reassuring.

As the dollar strengthens gold weakens & as the dollar falls, gold rises - .and it is my firm belief that the dollar is toast. If the dollar falls to the same magnitude which it has in previous interest rate cycles, we could see gold rally by 50%.

The Chinese government is [trying to]...transition the economy away from its reliance on manufacturing, which is shrinking, into a service economy [but is failing to accomplish this objective in spite of] a glorious debt-and-stimulus binge for the past few months. [Unfortunately,] these policies [may do nothing more than] add to the already insurmountable mountain of debt [of which] a good part is now going bad.

American balance of trade deficits will start to hurt and haunt the U.S. as the world migrates to a series of arrangements for trade beyond the USD (although the USD will continue to function as the lead foreign exchange/reserve and trade currency for sometime yet) and the introduction of an IMF-SDR basket of currencies.

If you routinely invest in gold while paying little attention to its less-expensive little brother, you might be missing out. Silver has performed very well in 2016—up about 20% and is expected to go much much higher over the short and long term for the following 3 reasons. Words: 412

It’s possible we could be on the verge of a perfect storm for gold. Supply is tight and growing tighter and, if pension funds (and other institutional investors) enter this market for any reason, demand could spike. In that scenario, Economics 101 says the price could be forced higher.

With inflation picking up but the Fed unable to hike because of the significant global volatility RBC speculates that there are now growing parallels to the 1970s when external pressures and fragile growth rates did not allow the Fed to hike. This was also notably a time of strong gold price appreciation. Could the gold price be repeating history?

The purpose of gold is to protect purchasing power and hedge against inflation but gold is not immune from speculative bubbles and overvaluation and when the price of gold is compared to the CPI index it is clearly evident that gold has become overvalued.

Before the U.S. dollar became the world's reserve currency that honor was held by Britain, then France, the Netherlands, Spain & Portugal and the U.S. dollar is no less susceptible to succumbing to the same change. In fact, many nations have been actively turning their back on the dollar over the past decade.