Whenever there is an (artificial) economic expansion, driven by cheap credit and too low interest rates, it is sooner or later bound to go wrong. What we do not know in advance, however, is how things exactly go wrong. We only know that – at an artificial interest rate – malinvestments are made in certain sectors of the economy. In the 90s, we saw malinvestments in internet (startup) companies, domain names and the NASDAQ. In the run-up to the 2008 crisis the malinvestments were mainly

Even though large parts of the world were colored white over the past week (large parts of Europe and the U.S. were covered in snow), the proverbial economic winter is yet to come. Last week, as we expected and already explained in one of our previous articles, the Fed announced another rate hike, this time from 1.25% to 1.5%. Moreover, Fed Chair Janet Yellen said she expected the Fed to continue their rate hike trajectory in the coming years. The Fed board is forecasting three more rate hikes

At the time of writing, Bitcoin prices reached an all-time high of more than $17,200 dollars, whereas over the past few months the gold price remained close to $1,200 per troy ounce. Moreover, when we have a look at recent data from Google Trends, we can see that “buy bitcoin” has become a more popular search term than “buy gold”. Even the followers of former member of the U.S. House of Representatives Ron Paul (an avid gold bug) have shown in a recent poll on Twitter to prefer Bitcoin over gold as a store of value.