Tag Archives: interest rates

To understand how the stock market behaves it is imperative to realize that the stock market is overwhelmingly influenced by interest rates. It’s difficult to overstate this key fact. Interest rates are the bone and marrow of the stock market. More specifically, the stock market is ruled by long-term and short-term interest rates creating an overriding framework for what drives the market in which different sectors do better or worse at different points in the economic cycle. This article explains the behavior more fully.

Many gold bugs hold out hope that any day now, gold will resume its march upward to $2,000, then $5,000 and then $10,000 per ounce. In answer to the question “How can anyone reasonably calculate what the value of gold is?” I want to put forth in this post a possible model for doing just that. The purpose of the model isn’t to say where gold will go but to look at the underlying factors that drive the price of the precious metal.

So much analysis we see and hear lately is concerned with whether the stock market is in a bubble or not. The truth of the matter, however, is that bear markets do not begin due to bubble-level valuations being reached and then bursting, but in anticipation of half a dozen mitigating factors as outlined in this article.

Everyone knows that interest rates are going to rise in the future so the real question is not whether they will rise, but when and by how much. [This article analyzes when that will most likely be.]

If the U.S. economy weakens in the second half as a result of higher energy prices, that could cause interest rates and the dollar to fall — fueling a rally in metals.

A change in monetary, fiscal, and regulatory policy is necessary to beat back the forces of recession and deflation. If the messages of falling gold prices and falling interest rates are not enough to gain the attention of policy makers, I suspect that the specter of future falling stock prices throughout the world will be. That is what is in store for us if the recessionary/deflationary bias in the world economy that gold and bonds are signaling, reasserts itself.

...For US stocks — and by implication most other equity markets — the danger signals are piling up to the point where a case can be made that the end is, at last, near. Take a look at these examples of indicators that should scare the hell out of anyone with a big stock portfolio.

Every now and then very informative, insightful and well-written financial articles gets buried by more trendy, exciting and provocative articles and, as such, they get overlooked - fly under the radar as Malaysia flight MH370 has done. Below are introductory paragraphs and links to a few such articles posted on the internet in the past week that are still very timely and well worth your time to check out.

How should investors approach sub $1,300 gold? The Bull and the Bear case is presented here as analysts each take a side and answer five questions.

Fed Chair Bernanke vehemently denies that the Fed “monetizes the debt,” but our research shows the Fed may be increasingly doing so. We explain why and what the implications may be for the dollar, gold and currencies.