Market News – Page 9 – Republic Precious Metals Exchange

Gamestop = Tech Bubble 2.0, Are You Ready For What’s Coming?

2021-01-272021-01-27 Sirhc

Stocks have entered a kind of speculative frenzy.

You’ve no doubt heard or read about Gamestop (GME) the bricks and mortar video game retailer.

The company has been in trouble for months, failing to turn a profit since 2018. And this is happening despite revenues growing.

Because of this, hedge funds have taken MASSIVE short positions in this company, borrowing shares from their brokers to bet that GME’s stock will collapse as the company lurches towards bankruptcy.

How big were the bets against GME’s stock? Well over 100% of the company’s shares are currently being used by shorts.

Yes, short sellers can technically borrow more shares than actually exist. And that’s where the speculative frenzy comes in.

Individual traders,(not institutional traders or hedge funds), who are big fans of GME’s business have launched a campaign to trigger a short squeeze in GME shares.

Remember how I said the short sellers had “borrowed” GME shares? Well, this means that they need to return those borrowed shares to their brokers at some point.

The only way to do this is by buying GME’s stock.

As a result of this, GME shares have gone from $20 to over $200 in pre-market trader today. And they’ve done this in the span of two weeks.

PODCAST: Juan Carlos Artigas, Head of Research at the World Gold Council, on why gold still glitters in 2021

2021-01-262021-01-27 Sirhc

Episode Description

Gold was one of the market winners of 2020 (with one of the lowest drawdowns over the course of the year), aided by a heightened risk environment, low interest rates, and strong price momentum, factors that show no signs of de-materializing anytime soon in 2021–not even with Bitcoin adherents making a counter-appeal as a safe haven asset. We talked to Juan Carlos Artigas, Head of Research at the World Gold Council, which provides timely insights on the gold market including drivers of demand, supply, and performance, and key attributes of gold as an investment and its role in investor portfolios.

Listen Here @ Spotify/Investable Universe

World Bank Head Sees “Quiet” Financial Crisis Brewing As Pandemic Lingers

2021-01-152021-01-27 Sirhc

In an interview Wednesday morning with Bloomberg, World Bank Chief Economist Carmen Reinhart bluntly said, “don’t confuse the rebound with a recovery.”

Reinhart said, “a rebound this year still leaves per capita income below where it was before the covid crisis – calling it a recovery is misleading.”

She went onto say that one year later, the world is still facing “record” infection rates, adding that “the longer this (virus pandemic) goes on, the more disruption in terms of jobs, in terms closures of business that can really get back to anything resembling normality.”

Reinhart said she is “very concerned the longer this goes on the more strain on balance sheets of individuals, households, firms, and countries – it’s a cumulative toll that I think will create classic balance sheet problems.”

Blaming the resurgence on the virus pandemic, she said economic growth for 2021 is being “marked down.”

She also said, “there’s been a problem that has been delayed but not avoided” – that is the households’ ability to repay their mortgage and service any other debt. During the virus pandemic, financial institutions worldwide agreed to grace periods for businesses and households, so they don’t have to repay their debts.

Reinhart then asks the trillion-dollar question: What happens when those grace periods come to an end?

How Are Gold And Money Supply Related?

2021-01-052021-01-08 Sirhc

M1 and M2 Money Supply numbers are surging. Will gold follow?

Let’s investigate an alleged relationship between gold and M2, a measure of money supply in the US.

Let’s also investigate what’s happening with M1, a more narrow measure of money supply. READ MORE

The BIS Issues A Dire Warning: “We Are Moving From The Liquidity To The Solvency Phase Of The Crisis”

2020-12-082020-12-08 Sirhc

by Tyler Durden

Tue, 12/08/2020 – 05:45

There are three certainties in life: death, taxes and the BIS – the central banks’ central bank – warning about excesses from monetary policy (the most recent amusing example of this was last October when as we wrote, “Fed Announces QE4 One Day After BIS Warns QE Has Broken The Market”). Actually, to this list of 3 certainties we can add one more: central banks roundly ignoring the warnings from the central bank mothership.

That, however, does not prevent the BIS from continuing this trend of warnings, and today the Basel-based organization did just that when in its Quarterly Review publication it cautioned that the surge in financial markets following COVID-19 vaccine breakthroughs and the U.S. election has left asset prices increasingly stretched.

Sounding surprisingly similar to Goldman, which as we reported earlier today issued an almost identical warning, when it observed that its sentiment indicator is now +2.0 standard deviations above average…

… which has left positioning extremely stretched and represents a 98th percentile reading since 2009…