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As Wall Street axioms (Santa rally, January effect, as goes January etc.) are rapidly falling by the wayside at the start of 2016, following a chaotic but return-less 2015, the UBS analysts who correctly forecast last year's volatility are out with their forecast for 2016. It's simple - Sell Stocks, Buy Gold. UBS Technical Analysts Michael Riesner and Marc Muller warn the seven-year cycle in equities is rolling over.

Sometimes, funny-money promoters like to dangle the idea that the "gold standard," in U.S. or world history, was a short-lived episode dating from about 1870 to 1914, a period of only forty-four years. I take a rather different viewpoint, that gold (and its adjunct, silver) was the primary basis of monetary affairs around the world for millennia, stretching up to 1971. When we look at the history of monetary arrangements, we find that gold and silver were usually used together, in what I sometimes call the "gold/silver complex." The reality was that silver and gold traded in a tight band...

Earlier this week, we told a fascinating story about an unprecedented, multi-year smuggling ring involving Turkey, Iran, and Dubai (as well as China, Russia and countless other nations) which saw corruption reaching to the very top of the political and financial establishment: from president Erdogan in Turkey, to one of Turkey's richest people, Iran-born Riza Sarraf, to Sheikh Sultan Bin Khalifa Al Nahyan, the son of the ruler of Abu Dhabi and one of the world's richest people. The smuggled object in question was gold, billions of dollars worth of gold. The focus of the story was the previously unknown...

There is no evidence that a Nazi train rumoured to be carrying gems and gold has been found in Poland, experts say. Researchers presenting findings about the alleged discovery in the Polish town of Walbrzych said there might be a tunnel but no train. However, one of those who claimed to have found the train said he still believed it was there.

For 182 years "1789 to 1971" the United States embraced the principle of a "stable dollar,"...[snip]...people had discovered that the best way to do this, in an imperfect world, was to link the value of the currency to gold. [snip] Britain "which in the 17th century had been an economic backwater of no great significance "then became the financial capital of the world, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, and ruler of the greatest global empire of the era.Not bad. [snip] The New York Times, surveying the landscape of contemporary thought, told us recently that out of 40 "leading economists",...

The IMF just confirmed Breitbart News’ October 5 warning that Saudi Arabia’s cash reserves are in free-fall, with a new estimate that the world’s richest kingdom may be bankrupt by 2020. Each October, the International Monetary Exchange issues its World Economic and Financial Regional Surveys. For the first time since the 1960s, the region set to suffer the worst financial agony over the next five years is the Middle East. Ground Zero for that pain is Saudi Arabia.

hris Skinner is a banking and technology and technology veteran who serves as the chairman of the Financial Services Club, a group created in 2004 to address the future of companies that serve financial markets. I’m often asked how quickly the changes I outline will take place, and my answer is between 10 and 20 years. The building of the real-time, almost free financial network on the Internet using blockchain and mobile will take about a decade at least before it becomes mainstream. "Oh," some go. "That's a way off. Can we talk about something happening sooner?" That's an interesting...

What is the best and least expensive way to buy gold for an investment?

Flashing some interplanetary gold bling and sipping "space water" might sound far-fetched, but both could soon be reality, thanks to a new US law that legalizes cosmic mining.In a first, President Barack Obama signed legislation at the end of November that allows commercial extraction of minerals and other materials, including water, from asteroids and the moon. That could kick off an extraterrestrial gold rush, backed by a private aeronautics industry that is growing quickly and cutting the price of commercial space flight. The US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015 says that any materials American individuals or companies find...

Due to what industry analysts say is a strengthening U.S. dollar, an expected rate hike from the Federal Reserve and an apparent Chinese stock market slump, the precious metal's prices temporarily fell to a longtime low of $1,051 an ounce. The commodity's price closed at $1,055.90 on the New York Mercantile Friday, CNN reports. The price indicates gold's decline in popularity since reaching its highest price of $1,890 in 2011.

Ted Cruz rocked in the presidential race during the CNBC debate. His biggest breakthrough, even more important than his crowd-pleasing holding the media to account, was his credible prescription to get job creation, and equitable prosperity, roaring the way they roared in the Reagan days. Cruz thereby seized, like nobody else yet has, the Reagan jobs-creation and income mobility mantle. Reaganomics had two main legs. Both were widely ridiculed at the time. Both were vindicated by history. The more famous of these was Reagan's dramatic cutting of income tax rates, across the board, to stimulate economic growth, a policy drawn...

"Investors" are so desperate to hold on to short-term paper that they paid $100 for a 3-month Treasury-bill at today's auction. That is a 0% yield - for the first time ever - lower even than the auction right after Lehman's bankruptcy in Nov 2008. It is probably safe to say that NIRP is next, followed by more negative yields further to the right of the curve, as the US gradually becomes Europe. But don't worry: as Yellen admitted during her healthcare-scare speech, "nominal interest rates cannot go much below zero", just a little.

Dying Petrodollar Ripples Through Markets As Asset Managers Bemoan Loss Of Saudi BidOne of the key things to understand about China’s liquidation of hundreds of billions in US paper is that far from being a country-specific phenomenon, it actually marks the continuation of something that’s been taking place in other emerging markets for some time.As we outlined in “Why It Really All Comes Down To The Death Of The Petrodollar,” the forced sale of Beijing’s UST reserves is simply the most dramatic example of what Deutsche Bank has called “quantitative tightening.” For years, reserve managers in the world’s emerging economies...

With countless settlements documenting the rigging of every single asset class, it was only a matter of time before the regulators - some 10 years behind the curve as usual - finally cracked down on gold manipulation as well, even though as we have shown in the past, central banks in general and the Fed in particular are among the biggest gold manipulators. That said, we are confident by now nobody will be surprised that there was manipulation going on in the gold casino. In fact, ever since Germany's Bafin launched a probe into Deutsche Bank for gold and silver...

Move over, microchip. A random assembly of gold nanoparticles can perform calculations normally reserved for neatly arranged patterns of silicon. Traditional computers rely on ordered circuits that follow preprogrammed rules, but this strategy limits how efficient they can be. “The best microprocessors you can buy in a store now can do 1011 operations per second and use a few hundred watts,” says Wilfred van der Wiel of the University of Twente in the Netherlands. “The human brain can do orders of magnitude more and uses only 10 to 20 watts. That’s a huge gap.” To close that gap, researchers have...

It’s well-known that you have to make a declaration if you physically transport $10,000 or more in cash or monetary instruments in or out of the US, or almost any other country; governments collude on these things, often informally. Gold has always been in something of a twilight zone in that regard. It’s no longer officially considered money. So it’s usually regarded as just a commodity, like copper, lead, or zinc, for these purposes. The one-ounce Canadian Maple Leaf and US Eagle both say they’re worth $50 of currency. But I’ve recently had some disturbing experiences crossing borders with coins....

Over the past several years, incidents involving fake gold (usually in the form of gold-plated tungsten) have emerged every so often, usually involving Manhattan's jewerly district, some of Europe's bigger gold foundries, or the occasional billion dealer. But never was fake gold actually discovered in the form monetary gold, held by a bank as reserve capital and designed to fool bank regulators of a bank's true financial state. This changed on Friday when Russia's "Admiralty" Bank, which had its banking license revoked last week by Russia's central bank, was reportedly using gold-plated metal as part of its "gold reserves." According...

Tyler Durden 09/09/2015 Just over one month ago, when looking at the latest changes in registered gold held at the Comex ,we were stunned not only by the collapse in this series to a record low of just over 350k ounces or barely over 10 tons, but also by the surge in "gold coverage", or the amount of paper gold claims on physical gold, which exploded to a record high 124 per ounce. This is what we said on August 3: While on its own, gold open interest - which merely represents the total potential claims on gold if exercised...

A culture official in Poland said radar imagery appears to confirm a story by two men who said they know the location of a mysterious Nazi train that may contain gold or other treasures. Deputy Culture Minister Piotr Zuchowski said Friday he's "more than 99 percent sure that the train is there," but couldn't confirm what was inside the train. ...... ........ The mystery train is believed to be in an abandoned tunnel near Ksiaz Castle, in southwestern Poland. Local legend says the train contains gold, precious stones, art and weapons. The two men who brought the train to the...

The mystery surrounding a legendary Nazi gold train buried in Poland took a new twist after the suspected location of the armoured train and its cargo went up in flames. The embankment by the Wroclaw-Walbrzych main line considered to be the favourite for the train’s location in the town of Walbrzych, southern Poland, was burnt along with 219 square yards of forest and bush on it.