Economy

Gold has a long and impressive record of warning of trouble ahead in the global economy. It has usually been right in the past — and it is telling us right now that the outlook is much less secure than the market assumes. You ignore it at your peril.

For the first time in U.S. history, the national debt has risen past $17 trillion. That number is a bit hard to comprehend and means little to Americans when not applied to their everyday lives. So just how does the national debt affect consumers, and why should the average American care about how much this country owes? Here's why and how.

The plunge in emerging markets that started this year has given us the Fragile Five (Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil, Turkey and India), courtesy of Morgan Stanley, because their big current-account deficits mean they are acutely vulnerable to a sudden exit of foreign capital. The trouble is, it isn't true. The next crisis will start, as did the last one, in one of the developed economies [and this time round] it is likely to come from one of these 5 countries:...

Canada’s housing market is the most expensive in the world - 60% overvalued by historical standards - and one simple reason explains it.

Do you think the USD is still on top? What makes a currency strong isn’t necessarily what makes it popular or valuable, as you’re about to read.

News out of Venezuela continues to be quite grim, pointing to further economic deterioration... Here is the the latest:

Most people deal in the present, rarely questioning the future beyond what they consider to be the very next event. The great majority of people...cannot imagine...a disastrous collapse as being in any way possible because surely, somehow, the governments of the world will fix things. The number of people whose eyes have been opened seems to be growing, however, and many of them are asking what the collapse will look like as it unfolds. What will the symptoms be? Here is how we see it.

I get tired of preaching economic disaster and I am sure readers are just as tired of reading about it. Yet, it is coming regardless. The disaster will be of such importance that one cannot overemphasize it or warn too often about it. It will be a disaster of unprecedented scale.

Compared with Ireland, where the individual tax rate is a whopping 48%, the U.S. national average of 36.9% is not so bad. How does your country compare?

The Canadian housing market is headed for a significant bust, in my view. It's going to be a repeat of the 2008 mortgage bubble deflation. Only it's happening to the north. People will lose a lot of money but those who understand and are properly positioned may gain fortunes.