I often receive e-mails with questions, comments and references. Frequently, I respond to these e-mails, but recently I received a few questions that might be of interest to a majority of our subscribers. How do central banks expand their balance sheets? What happens when the ECB buys all (government) bonds and countries go into default? Will the public burden the losses? What will the role of the IMF be? How long will government bonds remain on central bank balance sheets? Is the Federal... »

Do you remember? That darn “quantitative easing?” According to naïve gold bugs, this expansion of central bank liabilities (dollar bills and commercial bank deposits at the central bank) would lead to hyperinflation. By the way, whenever you hear the term “monetary base” (M.B.), then this term refers to the amount of central bank liabilities. This week I met the former chairman of the Federal Reserve in Cleveland, the creator of the monetary base as statistic, and he showed me why the

Last week we had yet another presidential debate. The Republican candidate Donald Trump went face to face with Hillary Clinton in their third television debate so far. Hillary Clinton, with her trained smile and manipulation behind the scenes, is the perfect politician; Donald Trump is the eccentric populist who never shuns an opinion. Yet one of the points made by Trump during the first television debate was completely ignored. And his plea happens to be one of the reasons why the upcoming elections in November will be very important for gold prices.