Readers of these pages will be familiar that in addition to holding its gold bars in a HSBC vault in London, the SPDR Gold Trust (GLD), the world's largest gold-backed ETF, at times also holds some of its gold bars in the vaults of the 'Bank of England' in London.

On March 23 rd it was announced that buyers from "unfriendly countries" would provide rubles in return for Russian gas, instead of the traditional U.S. dollar. Eventually the announcement was extended to oil and other commodities. Will the stringency of such a decree hold? The bet here is that it won't.

The crash that shaved more than $1 trillion of value from the digital-asset industry in the past few weeks was entirely foreseeable. I have been warning about the dangers of leveraging bitcoin and cryptocurrencies since 2018, as have others. Few heeded warnings as prices soared. The crash is healthy.

A much-watched stock market indicator that called the 2000 crash is signaling expectations are running too hot - setting up investors in many S&P 500 sectors for big disappointment, says a just-released report from Bank of America. Fifteen of the 20 stock metrics BofA monitors signal the S&P 500 is already "statistically expensive."

China's economy is going down quickly, even as the Evergrande collapse, and China's real estate crisis unfolds. And now, the Evergrande collapse is also expected to hit the Chinese foreign policy. The Chinese foreign policy is presently dictated by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) which involves large-scale debt financing by Chinese financial institutions, Chinese State-owned Enterprises (SOEs) and local government financing vehicles.

The median price of an American house has increased by 28 percent over the last two years, as pandemic-driven demand and long-term demographic changes send buyers into crazed bidding wars. Might the fact that corporate investors snapped up 15 percent of U.S. homes for sale in the first quarter of this year have something to do with it?

LONDON - A Turkish cryptocurrency exchange is offline and its CEO has reportedly gone missing, leaving thousands of investors worried that their funds have been stolen. Thodex, a crypto firm based in Turkey, said its platform has been "temporarily closed" to address an "abnormal fluctuation in the company accounts," according to a translated statement on its website.

The lockdowners have had surprising success in convincing people of their wild views. You only need to believe that virus avoidance is the only goal for ever...