Gold prices are rallying, but retail gold dealers and shops are struggling to survive.
As The Wall Street Journal reports, businesses that sell gold coins and other products made from the precious metal usually thrive during years like 2017.
Gold futures have gained more than 10%, boosted by a weaker dollar and by big investors looking for a haven during recent geopolitical tensions surrounding North Korea and Iran.
Earlier this year we wrote about a series of court documents that were unsealed and seemingly revealed a startling effort on the part of both Monsanto and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to work in concert to kill and/or discredit independent, albeit inconvenient, cancer research conducted by the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) related to their key herbicidal product, RoundUp. The efforts to kill the research came even as Monsanto's own lead toxicologist, Donna Farmer, admitted that she "cannot say that Round
At the last FOMC meeting - on September 20th - Janet Yellen and her merry band of failed forecasters proclaimed that the Federal Reserve Balance Sheet would be allowed to normalize with reinvestments slowed or stopped in October.
There's just one thing...
The Federal Reserve balance sheet has risen by over $5 billion in October - the biggest monthly rise since February.
The ongoing NFL "kneeling" protests are starting to have a major impact on downstream businesses, and none more so than Papa John's pizza. Earlier this week, the Sports Business Journal reported that Papa John's in-game pizza sales have fallen since President Donald Trump encouraged people to boycott the NFL in late September.
WTI/RBOB held on to gains overnight following major draws reported by API and more OPEC jawboning (this time from UAE), but the DOE data disappointed compared to API's huge draws with Crude and Gasoline drawing down but considerably less than API reported (and Distillates barely drawing down at all).
Bloomberg Intelligence energy analyst Fernando Valle:
Strong demand continues to spur inventory drains. Crude-oil stocks remain elevated, but refined-product inventories are looking increasingly tight.