Finance

Compare your salary. Negotiate smarter. Know where you stand. Compare salaries by industries, employers, and even university alumni. 143,332 professionals have already shared their data.

Preparing for, and living in, retirement halfway is a dead end. The richest and most successful retirement experiences and outcomes occur when taking on life and activities full-circle. Thinking in completion mode inspires endless loops of satisfaction. Closure is an accomplishment. It allows you to move your life and those of others, forward. It allows others to do the same. Here are five circles to an enriching retirement.

So you want to be rich? In order to join the millionaires’ club – and not get booted out because you went broke spending all your money – you’ve got to develop money smarts. The rich don’t stay rich by spending frivolously and being obsessed with beating the Joneses’. Here are some money management essentials you may want to keep in mind to master like the millionaires do.

Deutsche Bank’s catastrophic derivative exposure has hammered down its stock price from $135 in 2007 to only $17/share today - ergo a heart-stopping price loss of -87%. Furthermore, DB’s stock price appears to be hell bent for leather to follow Lehman Brothers’ lethal path to Wall Street’s graveyard due primarily to its oppressive derivative’s exposure. As Warren Buffett has said: “Derivatives are weapons of mass destruction.”

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%.

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.

Then the next time you hear the word "trillion" used in relation to government debt, the financial markets or the latest corporate takeover price take a step back. Then think again about the foregoing comparators. Finally, think again about the economic, business and financial markets content you are hearing, reading or seeing and the humongous numbers that are being bandied about without context.

A study by the consulting firm McKinsey suggests that one can expect lower market returns over the next 30 years than we’ve experienced over the past 30. Does that automatically spell doom for Millennials who are investing their money? Not necessarily. Here's why.

On April 19th China introduced a yuan-denominated gold benchmark on the Shanghai Gold Exchange in a move to become an even bigger player in the global gold market. Gold transactions to be conducted without dollars, separate from the New York and London metals exchanges that have dominated the gold market for decades. Will that be bullish for gold as so many analysts think?]

Gold investors have been slow and cautious to adopt crypto-currencies such as bitcoin seeing them as false competition to real money such as gold and silver. The major argument from gold bugs has been that bitcoin is not backed by anything tangible [but] that has all changed with the recent introduction of Digix - the gold standard in peer-to-peer digital assets because it is literally backed by gold.