Business

Authored by Shannara Johnson via HardAssetAlliance.com,

It all started pretty harmlessly: in December 2016, after about 12 months of deliberations, the Accounting and Auditing Organisation for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI) and the World Gold Council announced a new “Shari’ah Standard on Gold.”

The new standard was celebrated as a potentially big boost for global gold demand as it would give more than 2 billion Muslims in the world access to gold-based financial products that were previously forbidden to them.

Earlier this week we highlighted "Six Terrifying Graphs That Summarize America's Public Pension Crisis" which ranked state, county and city-level public pensions in the United States by which are screwed the most.  To summarize, the study concluded that public pensions in the U.S. alone are currently underfunded by nearly $4 trillion and that taxpayers in Illinois, California and New Jersey should probably be looking to move before getting drowned in their state's coming pension-induced tax hike tsunami.

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

Over the last couple of months, I have repeatedly discussed what has been possibly the most “boring” market ever. That was until the previous Wednesday when the market deciding to take a quick “road trip” to the 50-dma. 

It didn’t last long.

"Smells Like Victory" - Happy Memorial Weekend...

Let's start with this...

S&P at record highs as US macro data topples to 15-month lows...

Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

Pop quiz: What country has the world’s best performing stock market?

It’s not the United States. Or Canada. Or China.

The answer is Venezuela, whose primary stock market index over the last year is up nearly SEVEN FOLD, from 11,700 last summer to a record 72,700 today.

It’s amazing that a country where people are literally starving because there’s very little food available is seeing record stock market performance.