“ is the New Bitcoin” was the title of Ed Yardeni’s Wednesday briefing. Specifically, Yardeni said that “Risk-off investors may be concluding that gold offers greater protection from geopolitical risks than bitcoin, which is more like a risk-on speculative vehicle and has been weak recently.” Furthermore, Yardeni said, “We now think the gold price could reach $5,000 an ounce by year-end 2026 and possibly $10,000 by the decade’s end if not before.”
The gold stocks I recommend are: AEM, , , , EGO, IDR, , , and . What I like especially about these gold stocks, other than strong forecasted sales and earnings, is that they are “co-variance” stocks that typically “zig” when the stock market “zags.” As a result, I may continue to find even more gold stocks to recommend.
Fed Chairman , on Tuesday, in a speech at the National Association for Business Economics, acknowledged recent weakness in labor markets, which effectively signaled an impending key cut. During a question-and-answer segment, Powell said, “You’re at a place where further declines in job openings might very well show up in unemployment,” and added, “You’ve had this amazing time where you came straight down, but I just think you’re going to reach a point where unemployment starts to go up.”
The Fed Chairman also commented about the lack of economic data and called government economic data the “gold standard,” but admitted the Fed is also looking at private economic data. The good news is that an October rate cut is 100% certain.
China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced that consumer prices declined 0.3% in September, after falling 0.4% in August. The , excluding food and energy, rose 1% in the past 12 months, so this is the first sign that deflation may be ebbing. Food prices declined 4.4% in the past 12 months, while energy prices declined 2.7%. In the past 12 months, the producer price index () has declined 2.3%, so deflation has persisted on the wholesale level since May 2022. The deflation in China is due to overproduction of some products as well as an intensifying demographic decline from its “one baby” rule enacted decades ago.
Eurostat announced on Wednesday that in the eurozone declined 1.2% in August, led by a massive 5.2% drop in industrial production in Germany. Industrial output also declined in France and Italy. The bottom line is that due to economic weakness in China as well as new tariffs in the U.S., the entire eurozone is expected to slip into a recession. Germany is already in its third year of a recession, due to soaring energy prices that caused many manufacturers to outsource to the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia.
German Chancellor Friedrich Mertz is now lobbying the European Union (EU) to restrict its net-zero emission mandate and to allow more hybrid vehicles to be built. The heads of BMW and Mercedes have been very outspoken that the EU needs to relax its stringent emission goals.
I must add that I am not against hybrids and actually own two hybrid sports cars, but as car companies make more hybrid vehicles, they tend to be very heavy, and it is not necessarily an ideal solution. As an example, a BMW M5 sedan now weighs 5,390 pounds. By comparison, a Cadillac CT5-Blackwing, which is an M5 competitor, weighs 4,301 pounds and is a more nimble, better handling car, so I bought this Cadillac versus the BMW M5.