To understand how the current system might spin out of control and where the unraveling might begin, look at where the complexity – aka systemic risk – is of late being concentrated most quickly. Post-2008, the two areas that stand out are government debt – which has been substituted for private debt as governments have borrowed unprecedented amoun

As for tried-and-true business practices being supplanted by “innovations,” consider the fact that no major country balances its budget any more, while all engage in historically-unprecedented deficit spending and money printing.

A handful of major banks sold gold futures contracts worth tens of billions of dollars on the Comex futures exchange, frequently at odd times when trading was thin. This pushed the “paper” price of gold through technical support levels, which activated sell programs of momentum-trading hedge funds. The resulting additional selling pressure forced g

the Federal Reserve issued up to 2½-times more receipts than gold

The Fear Index is useful to measure gold’s true value. The Index’s average over the near-century covered in the above chart is 7.09 percent, compared to 2.27 percent in late 2013, which indicates that gold is undervalued. To return to the ‘norm’ – perhaps not the right word since most of the data measures an era of fiat currency – that this histori

To avoid having to repeat a disclaimer every time we mention a statistic, we’ll just say it here: Each time you see an official government number, there is an unspoken but implied assertion that it’s probably fictitious, but is being cited because even the distorted version backs up whatever point we’re making.

Today’s fiat currencies emphatically meet the above bubble criteria. The prices of government bonds denominated in euro, yen and dollars have risen to extraordinary levels (which is the same as saying interest rates have been forced to extraordinarily-low levels). And befitting its size and scope, this bubble is rationalized with two popular mantra

The world’s governments thus find themselves in an ever-shrinking box. And all it will take to trigger the crisis is a return to historically-normal levels of interest rates. As recently as 2000, 30-year Treasury bonds yielded over 6 percent and 30-year mortgages cost 7.5 percent. Let rates return to those levels and the global financial system imp

Shortly after his inauguration in 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt concluded that US problems were serious enough to warrant devaluation of the dollar, among other aggressive policies. Under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, only Congress had the power to “regulate” 6 the relationship between the dollar and gold, but FDR claimed that auth