“I need new conspiracy theories because all my old ones came true” is a great line making the rounds lately. More important to investors, and especially gold investors, is that the big picture remains intact, comments Brien Lundin, editor of Gold Newsletter.
It hits close to home as so many supposed tin-foil-hat ideas prove to be not so crazy after all. The parade of headlines in recent days does little to counter this trend.
Consider a non-farm payrolls number for January that was a multiple of the consensus expectation, as well as the ADP private payrolls total.
Also consider the CPI numbers that showed inflation falling just as the Fed and the Biden administration had hoped…and which were stealthily revised significantly higher a few days ago.
And now, of all things, we have one UFO after another being shot down over our northern skies, with Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of U.S. Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command, declining to rule out an alien origin for the latest encounters.
It is a crazy world indeed.
In regard to the first two items above, we would do well to remember the observation popularized by Mark Twain: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
I won’t go into all the sordid details, but you can expect the January jobs number to be eventually revised downward significantly, and for inflation to prove stubbornly higher than the Fed is currently projecting.
As for the aliens…my bet is that we’re only now discovering a Chinese surveillance program that had been evading our radar detection for some time. China likely jumped the shark by sending an overly large balloon that alerted us to the threat.
But we’ll see. If they are aliens, I hope they aren’t too put off by our new “shoot first” posture.
Meanwhile, if the blowout January jobs number is even remotely accurate, then all it does is delay the Fed’s eventual pause by a month or two.
All the other economic data is pointing toward a recession sometime between mid-year and year-end as the lagging effects of the Fed’s aggressive rate hikes begin to hit home. Combined with the economic reality of federal debt-service costs over $1 trillion/year, and we may even see the Fed start to ease this year.
An economic environment in which inflation remains stubbornly high and the Fed is no longer tightening would launch gold and silver to far higher levels. So, for now, ignore the damn lies and statistics…try not to worry too much about aliens…and let’s focus on the big picture.
I think we’re in a sweet spot right now wherein we can have great confidence in the bullish trend for the metals, yet most of the junior mining companies have yet to make big moves higher. It’s a rare window of opportunity.
Recommended Action: Deploy more capital into junior gold miners.
