Billionaire Puts Half His Net Worth Into Gold

Bubble

 NEWS!

Big Mac Index suggests America in decade-long depression- Peter Diekmeyer (30/04/2018)

America is in a Great Depression right now 

Measured in official terms, U.S. GDP came in at $19.4 trillion in 2017. That’s a 33% increase over the $14.5 trillion recorded in 2007. 

However, those $14.5 trillion could buy 4.25 trillion Big Macs back in 2007 when they cost just $3.41 each. 

By 2017, the price of a Big Mac had risen to $5.06, so the $19.4 trillion in GDP that year equated to only 3.83 trillion of the burgers. 

That suggests that U.S. GDP, as measured in Big Mac terms, fell by 10% between 2007 and 2017.

ShadowStats, stagnant wages and the two-income trap 

The idea of measuring U.S. GDP in Big Mac terms is, of course, far from fully-baked.However, the results tie in with a lot of other anecdotal data points. 

John Williams, of ShadowStats, for example has for years tracked how the U.S. Statistical agencies have changed their data calculations. The reasons cited by the officials always sound good, but their net effect is to make government statistics look a lot better than they actually are. 

Williams calculates that U.S. inflation (which came in at 2.36% during March) was running at 5.9% based on the way the government calculated the data back in 1990, 

and at 10.1% based on 1980 methodologies. 

The official U.S. unemployment rate of 4.14% during March is actually 21.7% when calculated using ShadowStats’ alternative measure. 

Other research, also by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, shows that real wage gains for U.S. workers in many categories have actually fallen during recent decades. For example, a typical 27-year-old man earned more in 1969 than he did three decades later.

Billionaire Puts Half His Net Worth Into Gold

Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris has put half of his $5.7 billion net worth into gold. 

According to Bloomberg, he said in an interview Monday that he believes gold prices will rally further, reaching $1,800 per ounce from just above $1,300 now, while “overvalued” stock markets crash.

That Collapse You Ordered…?

They seem to be pretty clueless about the fate of the USA these days, too. If you consider the preoccupations of two very recent Intel chiefs — John Brennan of CIA and James Clapper, DNI — who now inveigh full-time on CNN as avatars of the Deep State against the wicked Golden Golem of Greatness. Personally, I expect our collapse to be as sudden and unexpected as the USSR’s, but probably bloodier because there’s simply more stuff just lying around to fight over. 

Of course, I expect the collapse to express itself first in banking, finance, and markets — being so deeply faith-based and so subject to simple failures of faith. 

But it will become political and social soon enough, maybe all-at once. And when it happens in the USA, it will spread through the financial systems the whole world round.

 DYI