Janet Yellen

Steve Forbes has had enough of the Federal Reserve and its "sinning" policies to undermine the dollar. In this brief interview with Birch Gold Group, the publisher and CEO of Forbes, Inc. exposes the damage that the central bank has created, "Bernanke was a disaster...has totally mucked up the credit markets." Blasting Janet Yellen "who needs to go to re-education camp," Forbes explains why he believes so strongly in the gold standard, and the one single scenario under which he would ever sell his gold.

Having torched Janet Yellen over the weakness of the so-called "living wills" of the Too-Big-To-Fail banks, it appears Elizabeth Warren's tirade struck home. As WSJ reports, in a sweeping rebuke to Wall Street, U.S. regulators said 11 of the nation's biggest banks haven't demonstrated they can collapse without causing broad, damaging economic repercussions and ordered them to show "significant" progress by July 2015. Of course, the whole 'living will' concept is a self-referential joke, but we leave it to Thomas Hoenig to sum it up: "the plans provide no credible or clear path through bankruptcy that doesn't require unrealistic assumptions and direct or indirect public support." In other words, taxpayers are still on the hook.

Ten times a year, once a month except in August and October, a small group of well dressed men arrives in Basel, Switzerland.  Carrying elegant overnight bags and stylish brief cases, they discreetly check into the Euler Hotel, across from the railroad station. They come to this quiet city from places as disparate as Tokyo, Paris, Brasilia, London, and Washington, D.C., for the regular meeting of the most exclusive, secretive, and powerful supranational club in the world.

Look for a speech on Friday August 22^nd by Janet Yellen where she officially signals financial markets that they better start finding their respective chairs.

“But long term...and economic law says, if you keep printing a lot of paper money, the value of the dollar and currency will go down, and things and most prices will go up and indeed gold always goes up against that currency” - Ron Paul

We have been warning for years that as a result of the Fed's disastrous policies, America's middle class is being disintegrated and US adults are surviving only thanks to insurmountable debtloads. But not even we had an appreciation of how serious the problem truly was. We now know, and it is a shocker: according to new research by the Urban Institute, about 77 million Americans have a debt in collections.

It's one thing to implicitly admit that there is a physical gold shortage and as a result nations - such as Germany - are unable to repatriate their physical gold held in the safe and trusted confines 90 feet below the NY Fed, gold which may or may not be there and has likely been leased out exponentially to cover paper shorts by virtually every BIS-overseen central bank (and the BIS paper gold selling team itself of course). It is something totally different to corzine, as in vaporize, 87,000 ounces of physical gold, some 2.7 tons, and blame it on a computer upgrade glitch. Which is precisely what Rand, Afrrica's largest refinery and processor of about a third of the world's gold since 1920, has done after it "discovered" that $113 million in precious metal was missing after "adopting a new computer system."

The Money Market "gates" which we predicted in January 2010 are coming, have finally arrived.

In what could be the most unpatriotic report ever, Fidelity reports that average IRA contributions for tax year 2013 reached $4,150 - an all-time high. That's great news, right? Not if you ask Janet Yellen as Fidelity notes younger investors, those in their 20s, 30s and 40s, are adopting the strongest savings behaviors as Americans are "saving more, paying off debt, and spending less." This is not acceptable in the new normal, don't they know "debt is the bridge between hard work and play?"

One of the biggest mistakes that investors make is falling prey to cognitive biases that obfuscate rising investment risks. Here are 5 counter-points to the main memes in the market currently...

What does Janet Yellen know about Biotech stocks (or anything really)? Remember, "don't fight the Fed" ... unless they say 'Sell'.

History is replete with the total failure of Central Planning. Whether one look to China or the USSR or the US today, Central Planning has never successfully worked.  It creates the illusion of stability in the short-term, but eventually the truth comes out: that it is a TERRIBLE means of deploying capital (both human or monetary).

The actual state of employment in the U.S. is likely far weaker than the economic statistics currently suggest. If this is indeed the case, it creates a potential for policy mistakes that could have negative consequences to both the economy and the financial markets.

Ssshh... The trade only works if everyone is lulled into staying on the long side until it's too late.

"The head of the International Monetary Fund warned on Friday that financial markets were "perhaps too upbeat" because high unemployment and high debt in Europe could drag down investment and hurt future growth prospects." To summarize: first the BIS, then the Fed and now the IMF are not only warning there is either a broad market bubble or a localized one, impacting primarily the momentum stocks (which is ironic in a new normal in which momentum ignition has replaced fundamentals as the main price discovery mechanism), they are doing so ever more frequently.