Business

That most distinct remnant of the 2006 housing bubble - home flipping - is not only back, it is more profitable than ever.

According to a new report by ATTOM Data Solutions and RealtyTrac,193,009 single family homes and condos were flipped — defined as sold in an arms-length transfer for the second time within a 12-month period — in 2016, up 3.1% from 2015 to the highest level since 2006, when 276,067 single family homes and condos were flipped.

Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

I serve on the Board of Directors of a large Singapore-based company that’s in the gold and silver business.

And, last night during our quarterly conference call, the management team gave me a lot of intriguing information.

Sales of physical gold and silver are collapsing across the entire industry.

At the US Mint, for example, sales of US Eagle gold coins fell by 67% between February 2016 versus February 2017.

Via Birch Gold Group,

The Federal Reserve just raised rates once again, by 0.25%.

The move implies that the central bank has confidence in the economy, and markets are riding that confidence to push upward. But analysis of the fundamentals reveals that both markets and the Fed are missing something. How long can they keep egging each other on without facing facts?

What You’re Being Told

Based solely on official government data, the economic situation today looks pretty rosy.

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Standard and Poor's credit rating analysts for the state of New Jersey, David Hitchcock and John Sugden, apparently think that funding only half of your state's annual actuarially determined contributions is a bad thing...who knew?  So, just to make sure we achieve crystal clarity here, S&P believes that adding to NJ's $66 billion pension underfunded liability, which would be much higher but for a ridiculous assumption the state makes in setting its return on assets at an artificially high rate of 7.65%, each and every year by contributing less to the fund than what is