“By far, the majority of the jobs are part-time. Who knows what part-time means? Maybe it’s five hours or ten hours or whatever. The fact that the wage increase was only .1%, which by the way is 1.2% annualized, which is less than inflation, i.e. people are going backwards here. It should be worrisome to the average person.
Of course, that’s what’s been happening for decades here, that the workers’ wages are going up slower than inflation, and everyone’s essentially moving backwards in terms of total net compensation. So, yes it looked like a good report on the surface, but it wasn’t particularly strong when you get into the guts of the matter.”
“I saw an article on ZeroHedge where the U.S put a tariff on steel back in 2003 and the market went down 30%. And the tariff didn’t make it through the whole year… We have to wait and see what the repercussions are gonna be.
There’s no doubt that the U.S. economy has suffered for a long time by the lack of anyone trying to protect industry in the country. I feel sorry for people who rely on factories and manufacturing things to survive, because there’s been absolutely no care for that area. Everything’s become financial…
So you do need a little bit of strengthening of the trade policies. But what’s the effect on the stock market? It would be good for jobs to have tariffs, but the stock market? Totally different question. There will be outcomes in other countries in reaction to this… Nobody wins a trade war.”
“When you look at what Russia’s doing… The US dollar is very weak here. Wouldn’t you much rather have your money in gold? Why would you have it in US dollars when the dollar continues to weaken? And looks like it’s threatening to go much weaker? So, I can understand the logic of it.
I can understand these other countries (China, Turkey) that are adding to their gold supplies. It seems to make sense in the foreign exchange world we live in. So, good for them, and I hope other countries come into the fold, because it seems like the logical thing to do.”
Rick Rule, CEO of Sprott U.S. Holdings, and Amir Adnani, CEO of Uranium Energy Corp., discuss the role base metals play in the future of energy.
Rule said that while cobalt is attracting media attention for its use in the “electrification of things,” investors need to be cautious of companies that are not legitimately mining cobalt. “You have to be in Congo, or you have to be in Russia,” Rule told Kitco News on the sidelines of the PDAC 2018. “Everybody wants to be in politically secure, politically correct cobalt. It’s as if they wanted a cobalt discovery in Kansas.
But there isn’t any.” Adnani noted that while cobalt may play an important role in the battery theme, the often ignored phase of recharging those batteries is equally important, and this is where uranium comes into play.
“If everyone wants to drive an electric vehicle, and everyone needs to recharge these batteries around the clock at different points in time, the need for de-carbonizing the economy at the same time as making sure electricity is available around the clock can only be made available through nuclear power,” Adnani said.
“Man, it smells like a bull market here. There are lots of reasons you could imagine people would want to come into this market, and we’ve talked about it before. It’s what I call the bear market in cryptocurrencies, the bear market in bonds, which is becoming exceedingly obvious.
And, of course, the little correction in stocks, which is not in a bear market yet, but my God, if it turns into a bear market you only have one bull market! And of course, we’re seeing it not just in gold and silver, we’re seeing it even in the base metals and other physical products. So the market seems to be coming around to, ‘You know, I want to get my hands on something real, here.’ So it portends great things for gold and silver.”
It’s been a wild week in the markets, and Eric steps in to break it all down for us. In this wrap-up, you’ll learn what’s causing the volatility, why you should be watching the bond market, and what role the Fed could play in the coming year.
And, as always, he’ll let you know how precious metals are faring in all this.
“I could sit here as a guy with a big portfolio and say, ‘Well, thank God my gold is only down 2%, and my silver is only down 2%.’ Everything I own could be down eight. Or ten. So, I’m not hurting here… I think relatively, these things have done exactly what we would expect. They’ve probably been suppressed… The natural instinct should be to buy gold in this kind of environment. We’ll see what happens today. Lots of people in the world are going to be trying to find things to invest in that can hold their own, and I think we’re already seeing that gold and silver look like they’re filling that role.’”
