John Rubino's Contributions

Earlier today, articles started appearing about the rise of France’s right wing, anti-immigration National Front party in recent polls. This wasn’t a surprise given the ascendancy of formerly fringe political movements in most European states...

The intellectual groundwork is being laid for the next stage of the Money Bubble, and it’s going to be epic. Here are excerpts from two articles that appeared over the weekend (and which should be read in their entirety).

Sprott Asset Management’s Rick Rule is one of the smartest guys in the resource investing world — and one of the most reasonable — which has made his interviews of the past few years a little disconcerting.

Former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke will be remembered by future generations as the guy who didn’t see a housing bubble while he was creating it. That is, unless he says something even dumber, like this...

This story isn’t actually about Greece, but it begins there. After the country went functionally bankrupt a few years ago, the solutions proposed by its creditors (mostly European banks and governments) included the impoverishment of...

Back in the early 2000s, General Electric discovered that it could make even more money by exploiting its AAA credit rating to borrow cheap currency and lend it out at higher rates. It ramped up its vendor financing, enabling customers to buy more of its stuff...

Business Insider’s Myles Udland just posted a chart, drawn from research by the Bank of England, showing interest rates for the past 3,000 years. And for all those who’ve been feeling like today’s “new normal” is...

In one sense, energy doesn’t matter all that much to what’s coming. Once debt reaches a certain level, oil can be $10 a barrel or $200, and either way we’re in trouble.

Why is the eurozone regressing when the rest of the world is (or thinks it is) recovering? The answer is straight out of the currency war script: The US and Japan have been monetizing the hell out of their debt, weakening their currencies against the euro, and generally giving themselves a trade advantage.

Most people — certainly most governments and economists — define inflation as a general rise in prices. But this is wrong. Inflation is an increase in the money supply, of which a rising general price level is just one possible result — and not the most common one.

Analyses of China’s massive appetite for gold are everywhere lately. But the following chart, which appeared today in a GoldCore market update was especially striking because it compares 2013 demand with that of 2012 – which was a big year in its own right.

If history could talk, the first thing it would say is, “Enjoy the tranquil stretches because they’re always temporary.”

One of the reasons that the developed world seems relatively stable while our debt, currency creation and unfunded liabilities go crazy is that we have a safety valve.

It’s around 10:00 on a Friday night in early 2005. I’m shooting pool in a local bar with Hunter, a math professor at the local university who had just come into a big inheritance and was tossing it around like the found money that it was.

In normal times, today’s combination of record low interest rates and massive infusions of capital into the banking system would ignite the mother of all expansions. That it hasn’t has confused the economists whose textbooks clearly state that it should.

Here’s National Numismatics’ Tom Cloud with a quick dealer-level view of gold and silver.

The Consumer Metrics Institute is generally a pretty subdued bunch, as befits their job interpreting economic statistics for money managers and other economists.

Last Friday was one of those days when so many markets move so dramatically that it’s hard to know what to focus on.

Based on both recent history and mainstream economic theory the past few years should not have been possible. When you cut interest rates to near-zero, run deficits of 10% of GDP and buy up every government bond in sight with newly created currency, you get a boom, end of story. That’s just the way capitalism works.

In this week’s Q & A, National Numismatics’ Tom Cloud updates his near-term precious metals price targets and explains why silver will rise faster than gold once the bottom is in.