Financial crisis

My advice to investors is to learn from the recent economic problems/disasters in Turkey, Argentina and Venezuela. Any amount of personal gold, even very small, would have saved the holders in these countries from misery. It is also now critical to heed the strong warning signs of deep trouble coming in Europe, Japan and the USA.

Banking mergers are absolutely not the answer to the banking problems today – in fact, they would constitute a dangerous leap forward.

As a wealth management advisor, substituting the easy solution of acquiring gold mining shares to physical gold – whether within a life insurance policy or with an ordinary account – would be a mistake.

The exact level of the collapse in investment assets and surge of gold is of course impossible to forecast. What is virtually certain is that gold, relative to other assets, will increase substantially in value.

Venezuela’s central bank in April paid $172 million to U.S. bank Citigroup to recover part of the gold it had put up as guarantee in a swap operation.

Records that were reached in the last sovereign debt crisis are being shattered... savers are right to be worried – not only Italians, but all Europeans...

These two inventions were totally revolutionary in the history of finance. First to print money at no cost and then to issue debt and be paid for that pleasure.

As any asset class, gold has several financial properties. The yellow metal can be used for two different purposes: either as a hedging tool against certain macro-economic scenarios or for portfolio diversification. Its virtues, though, are not the ones frequently mentioned in the media...

It can’t happen here! What is happening in Venezuela and Argentina cannot occur in Western economies. That’s at least what markets believe with stocks and most bubble assets remaining in cloud cuckoo land. Rates in Argentina have just gone to 40% to protect the currency. Anyone who believes that rates in the US will remain at current low levels or that German and Japanese rates will remain negative has a massive shock coming.

The whole of French wealth owned by individuals totalled 5.233 Trillion euro at the third quarter of 2017, up 8.5% year-to-year. This is the equivalent of 178,200 euro of gross financial wealth per household. It means that French households were 15% richer than their German counterparts (107,700 euro) in the third quarter of 2017. Where are going these “record” savings?