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Collectively, our net worth reached a new high in nominal, real, and per capita terms according to the Fed's Q3/16 estimate of the balance sheets of U.S. households released last Friday. While we are living in the weakest recovery ever, and things could and should be a lot better, it is still the case that today we are better off than ever before.

There has been a need for clarification for how gold bullion can be used for investment purposes by Muslims for a long time and this uncertainty has kept Shariah-compliant offerings at a minimum, and many investors restricted by the type of gold bullion transactions they are able to partake in, with most focused on jewellery and coin offerings. The introduction of the Shariah Gold Standard now gives as many as 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, 25 per cent of the population, far greater access to the gold market than they have had since the birth of modern finance.

If you earn $250,000 a year does that mean you are rich? The answer is “no” – and it turns out that the actual statistical relationship between income and wealth is surprisingly low.

A financial tsunami is scheduled to hit the U.S. economy and taxpayers over the next several years and being fully aware of what will be happening should be one of the foundations of any retirement or financial planning process. Hopefully, this analysis proves helpful for you in that regard.

In the next 5 years most people will lose 75-90% of their wealth and some 100% but investors needn’t lose most of their money if they took a few measures to protect their fortune...

Inflation expectations have been on the rise since before the U.S. election, but markets are now more convinced of higher inflation to come due to President-elect Trump’s talk of fiscal stimulus and tax cuts. Measured by break-evens in the Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS) market, inflation expectations for the next 10 years rose to 1.93%, the highest level since the summer of 2015. The long decline in inflation seems to be turning, as the CPI climbed 1.6% year-over-year, the most in two years. This changing environment has piqued investor interest in TIPS, and in turn, TIPS ETFs.

No matter where we are on the road to retirement, we have three tools at our disposal: contributions, time and investment returns. The question is, what can we do to improve our retirement equation?

Each and every day of the year I review hundreds of financial articles looking for the very few that are succinct, informative, thought-provoking and well written and bring them to my readers in a Market Intelligence Report. Below are today's best:

Inflation lurks in the shadows. It destroys value by gradually eroding real returns over time. It is financial death by a thousand cuts. Investors too often look at "the numbers" in their portfolio without asking what those numbers can actually buy over time. It's a classic mistake that John Maynard Keynes termed "money illusion."

There's a good chance U.S. growth will pick up from 2016 [because, as I see it,] two key shifts are helping to propel growth higher, albeit within the context of broad structural trends keeping growth rates lower than in prior economic cycles.