Podcast: Play in new window
- Bond Yields Rise As Powell Cuts Rates
- Gold Rises As Powell Ignores Inflation
- Zelenskyy Campaigns For Harris With U.S. Assets
“But the mantra kept on being uttered, “we’re data dependent,” but we knew this last week. Supercore is not suggesting an end to inflation. Tightness in the labor market is not either. And while supply chain contributions to inflation pressures are diminished, you still have geopolitical concerns and rumblings of trade conflict, which keep the likelihood of an inflationary rebound pretty darn high because you don’t move away from those supply chain issues when you’ve got those kinds of things. Again, trade conflict, geopolitical concerns, these circle us back around to supply chain issues, and again, just an inflationary rebound.” – David McAlvany
Kevin: Welcome to the McAlvany Weekly Commentary. I’m Kevin Orrick, along with David McAlvany.
David, let’s just try this for a second. All right, so Jerome Powell, Kamala Harris, and Zelensky of Ukraine walk into a bar. They buy everybody drinks, and they say, “Hey, the economy is great, but we’re still going to lower the interest rate 50 basis points.” Now, you’ve got long bond in there.
David: You had me at free beer. Yay!
Kevin: You’ve got Mr. Long Bond there, and at first he snickers, and then you’ve got Mr. Gold there, and he snickers and then he bursts into laughter with tears. That’s what we saw last week. Gold is hitting all-time highs. The long bond said, “Huh, yeah, you may be buying us free beer, but yeah, interest rates are going up, buddy. Not down.”
David: Exactly. Exactly. Well, there was a contrast, a very interesting contrast if you look at what happened in the U.S. bond market versus the Chinese bond market a few days later. This week, the PBOC offered support to the Chinese economy in the form of, number one, reduced bank reserve requirements. That gives extra liquidity to be loaned out into the economy to stimulate growth.
Kevin: Right.
David: And a policy interest rate cut to stimulate growth as well. Chinese 10-year Treasury reached near 2%.
Kevin: That’s amazing. Aren’t we paying double that? I mean, why do Americans have to pay 4% interest?
David: Well, that is a good question, because the U.S. 10-year Treasury has often been referred to as the benchmark for the risk-free rate, but it’s double that of the Chinese. But the behavior of the Chinese bond was telling. They lowered rates, and lo and behold, the bond market, those yields go lower as well. And monetary policy loosening.
Kevin: Does that mean they have credibility where we don’t?
David: You had TLT, which is an exchange-traded fund, a measure of U.S. long bonds. It’s had its fifth day in a row of increasing yields. At least for now, the PBOC has more market credibility than the Fed, and that’s tough to swallow. The U.S. government bond market has done its own thing with yields moving higher, and that’s the twos, fives, 10s and 30-year, even while the Fed last week dropped rates 50 basis points.
Kevin: So that bond market, Mr. Bond is not buying it. He’s snickering and then laughing and interest rates are going up.
David: It’s the opposite of what most market practitioners would assume. This is an incredible market. The Fed says it’s time to loosen financial conditions, and the market, the bond market particularly, contradicts that with the response of, “we’ll maintain tighter financial conditions if you won’t.” There is a credibility standoff between the FOMC and Mr. Bond. So data dependency died last week. Actually, data dependency died a bunch of years ago.
Kevin: Yeah, they stopped looking at the numbers and just started looking at the politics.
David: But the mantra kept on being uttered, “we’re data dependent,” but we knew this last week. Supercore is not suggesting an into inflation. Tightness in the labor market is not either. And while supply chain contributions to inflation pressures are diminished, you still have geopolitical concerns and rumblings of trade conflict which keep the likelihood of an inflationary rebound pretty darn high because you don’t move away from those supply chain issues when you’ve got those kinds of things. Again, trade conflict, geopolitical concerns, these circle us back around to supply chain issues, and again, just an inflationary rebound.
Kevin: Well, not only supercore is saying inflation is not ending, but all you have to do is go through a grocery line and listen to people in front of you and behind you. Dave, they’re just shocked. Four or five items, $80 or $90, and they’re like, “What the heck is happening? This can’t go on.”
David: Well, the question would be, is Mr. Bond sniffing out the return of inflation? Mr. Gold sure is. We are breaking into fresh new highs in the gold market, 2,640 and above. Gold’s now up over 27% year to date. Think about what that tells you. We’re not in a market free fall, we’re not in World War Three, and yet gold is telling you something. Silver’s up over 31%. So the numbers of interested investors in Apple and NVIDIA and Tesla make the gold market look like child’s play. Nobody’s been interested. The results in the metals market have been strong, but at least in the U.S. market to date, it’s a “who cares?”
Kevin: Obviously, though, there are people who do care. China buying, and other worldwide buyers. But let me just ask you, Dave, because if inflation hasn’t gone away— You interviewed John Taylor years ago, and there’s something called the Taylor Rule. It’s a simple rule. Interest rates need to be above what the inflation rate is.
David: There was only one dissenting vote last week. It was Bowman. She wanted a 25 basis point cut, suggesting the inflation fight was not over. Everyone else, particularly your equity traders, were really excited that the Fed delivered the goods. And we did see an interesting behavior. Last week, we had options expiration, so as we got to Thursday, Friday, a lot of upside surprise in the equity markets. So our colleague Morgan Lewis pointed out in last week’s Hard Asset Insights that the 50 basis point cuts of that scale, they’re reserved for crises, they’re reserved for recessions, they’re reserved for panics.
You had Rabobank Senior U.S. Strategist Philip Marey casually observing that the 50 basis point cut did not resonate with the Fed’s assessment that the economy is still strong. And that’s because, again, as Morgan was pointing out, 50 basis points is usually reserved for crisis, recessions, and panics, but the economy is strong, says Jerome Powell. When reflecting on the current state of play for inflation here in the U.S., StoneX Global Macro Strategist Vincent Deluard reminds us of that Taylor Rule, and he said the Taylor Rule estimate of a neutral policy rate—of the neutral policy rate—calls for a 25 basis point hike.
Kevin: Right.
David: So instead of 25 basis points lower, they went 50 lower when, according to the Taylor Rule, they should have gone 25 higher. Taylor seems to have been shelved for the time being, and that’s a problem. As we closed out last week, the Fed has guided forward via its dot plots another 50 basis point drop by year-end. Taylor be damned.
Kevin: And you bring up Taylor and the Taylor Rule, and what you’re talking about is a neutral policy, which is actually a compromise for Taylor, because Taylor, really, doesn’t he say you need to have about a 2% interest rate over the inflation rate? So if he says neutral—
David: Can be. Yeah, he’s looking for neither stimulative nor constrictive in terms of monetary policy. Rates need to be in this equilibrium zone, and if it’s 25 basis points higher from here, but the Fed is guiding forward—giving you forward guidance on their policy—that it’s actually going to end the year 50 basis points even lower after last week’s move, they are out of step with the data.
Kevin: Yeah, because, well, again, Mr. Bond and Mr. Gold are not saying that that’s accurate. But let me ask you this, is the economy good? When they came in and bought the beer and said, “Hey, the economy’s good and we’re still going to lower rates—” Let’s talk about the economy for a moment.
David: I think they were probably the first ones in the bar. For them, it’s probably beer goggles. Everything’s beautiful with enough—
Kevin: Yeah. They had already had a couple.
David: Exactly. So beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and your range of what is acceptable beauty I think changes with the amount that you’ve been drinking. We know that that’s true. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We scratch our heads sometimes. But you can’t have it both ways. Either the economy is strong and a site to behold, and we do not need a 50 basis point cut—soon to be 100 basis points—or the economy is not strong.
Kevin: So are those the only two explanations, or is there something we’re missing?
David: Ah, the fallacy of false alternative. Ah, beware of the third explanation. Perhaps the economy is still in the post-COVID realignment with surprising strength lingering, like your shadow, from the surprising scale of fiscal stimulus. And so, yeah, let’s consider a third explanation. Fiscal sustainability is out the window, maybe the 2-year, 5-year, 10-year and 30-year bonds increasing in rates in the face of a decrease in the fed funds rate is a five-day anomaly. And maybe it’s the bond market’s first indication of getting some backbone.
We go back to the BIS report mentioned last week, Bank of International Settlements. Quoting Claudio Borio, he’s the head of the BIS Monetary and Economics Departments. “We should be under no illusion,” he says, “this is not the first and will not be the last turbulence in markets. It is a part of the bigger picture, the inevitable withdrawal symptoms that markets suffer as they transition away from the extraordinary period of exceptionally low interest rates and ample liquidity.”
Kevin, I would qualify that by saying that the adjustment to higher rates is still ahead. What we saw is one version of an interest rate tightening cycle. Policy moves are one thing. Market moves are another altogether. And I’ve wondered when the bond market would bring discipline to the US political class. Wondered and waited, and frankly we may not have to wait much longer.
Kevin: Well, and that’s the thing that we have to keep in mind. The Federal Reserve has the illusion of control, but it’s only of short-term interest rates. The long-term interest rate market is a megalith, it’s gigantic, and it ultimately moves everything.
David: That’s right. So the bond market and gold together signal something curious. And the fact that they are signaling at the same time I think is extra important. Perhaps the signal will be lost in the weeks ahead. The collective applause of speculators around the globe approving of cheaper money and a lot more of it. But there will be a day. There will be a day when what gold is telling us—you, me, all of us—sinks in. It’s at fresh all-time highs.
Kevin: Well, and it makes you wonder if we’re getting a whisper in our ear that we should be looking at gold and the bond market right now.
David: Yeah, maybe gold’s been telling you something for some time and you just haven’t listened. Makes me think of C.S Lewis’s comment in his book, The Problem of Pain. “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” Perhaps this is going a step too far, but interest rates are the market’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world. And interest rate increases in recent days, maybe they’re too subtle perhaps, maybe too early perhaps, maybe this doesn’t last, but let’s see if Mr. Bond continues to protest Mr. Powell.
Kevin: Well, and didn’t Morgan Lewis say that this is an emergency measure? When you see a 50 basis point drop, that’s what you do when you’ve got a crisis.
David: Yeah. Back to Lewis—Morgan, this time: “The new reality of a runaway fiscal problem compromising monetary policy means that the traditional monetary inflation brake is effectively broken.”
So the third explanation keeps our eyes firmly focused on domestic considerations. Elevated rates must come down because frankly the interest costs are already a burden too great to factor into the budget. And we’ve done this math before. It’s always changing because we don’t know what tax receipts will be, but as a percentage of tax revenue, interest expense is way too high.
The US Treasury calculates that to date they’ve received tax revenue of $4.391 trillion. If we divide that by 11 to estimate what the monthly income has been, and then figure out what we could apply for the last month of the fiscal year 2024, $399 billion. Let’s include that for September. So for the full fiscal year 2024, revenue you can estimate to be about $4.79 trillion. Only a month left, it’s not a bad guess. Do the same for interest expense, and you have a full fiscal year’s interest expense at $1.14 trillion. That’s 23.7% of tax revenue. 23.7% of tax revenue going to debt service.
Kevin: Yeah, that’s like credit card debt if you think about it. I mean that’s almost 25%.
David: Mr. Bond might reasonably decry, that is unsustainable. And it’s not immediately fixable. It’s not like you can change that because you’re talking about this massive quantity of debt that has just been refinanced. It’s in the process of being refinanced at higher numbers. The only way to make the math work is to increase taxes. That’s wonderful. Thank you. That’s so encouraging.
You had the Wall Street Journal last week that said, “despite intensifying polarization, the Republican and Democratic parties are alike in one important respect. Both now behave as though budget deficits don’t matter.” Well, that’s brilliant.
Kevin: Well, and we’re talking about domestic matters here, and we’re looking at America and how much is going to interest. But if you look at the world right now, Dave, just look at the last week, what’s been occurring. I mean, you’ve got Zelensky here in America, campaigning for a presidential candidate. That’s amazing to me that we have a world leader who is involved in a war coming and campaigning on one side here in America. But you’ve got what’s going on in Israel. You’ve got what’s going on in Asia right now. I mean, the ramming of the vessels down in the South China Sea. So what’s that got to do with Mr. Bond and Mr. Gold?
David: Well, I think, first of all, Zelensky knows who butters his bread.
Kevin: Well, that’s true.
David: That’s easy enough. But we talked about the bond market saying something, and that’s both an international market, but we are talking about domestic concerns. I think the message from gold is far from domestic only. Here you’ve got the global markets weighing in as well.
Surveying the geopolitical landscape, it’s really hard to disagree with J.P. Morgan’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, that a single rate cut isn’t that consequential when compared to— Let me quote him, “The most important thing that dwarfs all others—far more important today than it’s been probably since 1945—this war in Ukraine or what’s going on in Israel in the Middle East, America’s relations with China.” Iran, North Korea, and Russia, I think you can legitimately call them an axis of evil. So this is the CEO at J.P. Morgan looking and saying, “What keeps me up at night is the geopolitical.” And I think gold captures that.
Kevin: So what you’re saying is we can watch the bond market, but right now gold is probably yelling the loudest?
David: It is. And it’s saying something about the viability of our fiscal position. It’s also saying something about the inherent risks within the geopolitical arena that we have today. Gold may do a better job of encapsulating, of reflecting the theme of both US fiscal unsustainability along with geopolitical issues that are still incubating.
Let’s not forget the selective—shall we call it repudiation of the US dollar standard. If you go back to 2022, the global reaction to the targeting of Russian assets in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the seizure of assets has flipped a switch for central banks globally to say, “Maybe we need to have some of our wealth where we control it and it can’t be taken from us indiscriminately.”
Kevin: So we’re looking at a lot of things. You have always used this pattern where we go from the financial to the economic to the political to the geopolitical. At this point, it’s hard to understand, really, what’s going on in any of those realms. They’re not making a lot of sense, and so I would ask you, Dave. If gold is the answer, what is the question?
David: Right. It’s what happens next. Gold is the answer. Yeah. What was the question?
Kevin: Yeah.
David: Gold is not framing it as a question and answer as much as problems—plural—and solution. Gold is the answer as a solution to a complex problem of fiscal and geopolitical risk mitigation.
Kevin: So does this rise in gold, does this transcend? You look at the Commitment of Traders Report. These are guys who are trading futures. They’re going in, they’re going out. They don’t care whether it goes up or down. They need to make money on the up and the down. Right now, the commitment of traders, there’s a lot of guys holding highly leveraged positions in metals. Yet, gold continues to rise. What do you think about that?
David: Yeah. Well, that’s one of the reasons why gold is rising. We often talk about the COT reports, the Commitment of Traders Reports as it relates to gold. One thing we should mention is that when buying and selling futures contracts, rarely are those contracts delivered as physical metals.
Kevin: They’re just trading paper.
David: Primarily means of hedging production, speculating on price with as little money down as possible. I had the opportunity to read the COMEX comments and notes on the September ’79 to March of 1980, the decisions made as it related to the silver market. I read that this weekend. It was a fascinating read, and basically goes through— As the price of silver was increasing, they needed to increase margin. It started at $2,000 a contract. Ended up being as high as $60,000 a contract.
Kevin: So they were truly manipulating that market?
David: Well, I think it’s fair. I think it’s fair to require speculators to have more skin in the game as the price goes higher.
Kevin: Right.
David: What’s not fair is what they did in March of 1980, where they basically said, “We’re not taking buy orders anymore. You can only liquidate.”
Kevin: Right.
David: That’s an interesting dynamic. All of a sudden, you think you’re playing by one set of rules, and the folks that make the rules change them quickly. We are talking about what happens in the futures market. Right?
Kevin: Right.
David: Now, there is another market. That’s the physical market. We are transitioning back to ETF accumulation, Exchange Traded Products like GLD and SLV and these types of things. IAU. There’s other proxies for the metal price, and we’re beginning to see accumulation, which by contrast to the futures market, it actually reduces the available supply of physical metals in the market.
Again, I said not everybody takes delivery of a contract. So you can play with the price, but you may not be impacting the supply at all. It’s just playing with paper. But the ETF market does actually take physical metals off the market, and so that accumulation, reducing the available supply of physical metals, this is beyond a price speculation. The increased demand for ETFs is a supply-suck which should be watched closely. If you reduce the supply too much—and maybe that’s in the face of flat or marginally rising demand—you have a strong move to the upside.
Kevin: Okay. So I want to differentiate the two because I remember going to Zurich with you, and you meeting with gold guys, direct gold guys because we could not get physical gold during the 2008, 2009 crisis. You’re talking about the leveraged guys. You’re talking about the paper guys. The paper price of gold fell—what was it? It was close to 30% initially. Yet, we had high demand for physical metal, and we could not accumulate that, and you said, “Never again.”
David: Right.
Kevin: So we’re not going to do that. We’re going to go—
David: I want to create relationships directly with Umicore, and PAMP, and Argor-Heraeus, and the fabricators of large bulk bars so that we could, under any circumstances, supply metals. That’s the kind of thing that we’ve done for the Vaulted Program, gone direct to the source as opposed to expecting the secondary market and the COMEX Exchanges to have ample supply. When they run out, we will never run out.
Kevin: Right. So when you’re buying paper gold, you’re still buying paper gold, and that may not at all give you an illustration of what the real market is doing in the physical metals.
David: Well, and again, I assume that the ETF is a part of that physical metal complex because you have to deliver physical gold into a depository after the purchase has been made.
Kevin: How leveraged are the leveraged guys, though, on the paper side?
David: Well, in the futures market, that’s where most of the leverage has been. That’s what we find. That’s why we talk about the COT Reports as often as we do. And I think right now they own a lot, or they own more than they have in four or five years. There’s a reason for caution with that in mind in terms of the price and where it is today. But on the other hand, on the other hand, the ETF investor who’s unleveraged and allocating to physical ounces once again—and we are beginning to see that creep back up—they have a long way to go before being overextended. Therefore, the price may have a long way to go as well. Demand would need to increase by 45% in ounces to return to the previous 2020 peak in ETF ounces. I don’t think we can achieve—again, this goes back to 2020—I don’t think we can achieve the 1,268 tons—that was the peak in tons from 2020 (from the current count of under 900 tons)—without the price exceeding 3,000 an ounce.
Kevin: Okay. So if the ETFs continue to buy gold and we get back up to where we were in 2020, what you’re saying is the price has to go up?
David: That’s an if. There’s a big if there.
Kevin: Right.
David: I mean, we’ll see if it does continue, but we have gone from liquidation mode and disinterested mode to re-engaging. We’re beginning to see the volumes pick up there.
Kevin: Well, and the beauty of a gold investor, if they really understand why they’re buying physical gold, it’s not all based on price anyway. There’s an awful lot of other factors to keep in mind. But Dave, about a month ago you talked actually a little bit about the charts on gold, and you made a statement that we really had about a 12-year consolidation of gold before we made this move. So, in a way, it’s like jumping off of something. You want to make sure that you’ve got a firm foundation before you jump. Would you say that gold built a firm foundation over the last dozen years or so?
David: I do. I think that dozen years puts us in a really intriguing position. There’s a long road ahead for the precious metals. Have we had a good year this year? Sure. Perhaps some consolidation in price. We could see that in the fourth quarter. We could see that in the first quarter next year. That review or discussion from a month or so ago on the breakout out of a 12-year consolidation pattern, the very cheesy teacup and handle formation. If history offers insight—occasionally it does, and particularly in technical analysis; this is where history has a lot to say—then a seven to eight-fold move is ultimately how that pattern resolves itself. Now, that would imply a $7,000 to $8,000 gold price. Price is one thing. For me, relative value is something else altogether. So you say, “$5,000 gold.” I say, “Meaningless.”
Kevin: Right.
David: What’s the ratio to equities? I need to know what it buys me. You say, “$8,000 gold.” I say again, “meaningless.”
Kevin: Yeah, because they’re destroying the dollar. Let’s compare it to something real.
David: Yeah. I want to know the ratio to other assets. Ultimately, you’re dealing with an exchange of value, not merely a price. This morning, a local realtor sent me an advertisement, local listing, 350 acres, $1.5 million. It’s actually priced pretty well in dollar terms, but it is landlocked and there’s no easement to it, so there’s a reason why it’s priced at less than 5,000 an acre. But nevertheless, 350 acres, $1.5 million. In ounces, that’s 560 ounces today.
Kevin: Yeah. Which would you rather have right now?
David: I’d rather have the ounces.
Kevin: Yeah.
David: But for 150 ounces, I’d be interested in the exchange for that property. Is that unreasonable? Maybe. Time will tell. They say that real estate, they’re not making any more of it, and so that’s one of the reasons why, if you can buy good real estate, it makes sense. And yet I’m reminded, there’s a Chicago office building in the last month that sold for under $10 a square foot. This is Class B, Class C property. Office space. That’s 91% lower than it was priced four years ago. So four years ago, it sold for 74 million. So now it’s gone from 74 million to 6.
Kevin: Wow.
David: $6 million. In ounces, it went from 49,333 ounces of gold—again, gold back then was about 1,500 bucks. Now it’s 2,272 ounces, a 95% drop in ounces.
Kevin: Yeah. See, that’s the amazing thing. When you get to talking to people— I’ve got some clients who are farmers in Nebraska, and they want to continue to buy farm land around them, but they’re holding ounces right now. And when we first started buying ounces, oh, 10 years ago, I think an acre was about five ounces of gold. And their goal is to pick up acreage when it gets down less than two. Well, that’s just reasonable, and they’re getting closer.
David: Investors don’t see it that way. You’ve had the interest in the high speculative investments, the highest return investments, and at this point, the mindset of investors is focused on returns and reward, not on risk at all. So you’ve had huge demand for leverage loans. You’ve had huge demand for junk debt. You’ve had a huge demand for private credit. What is that? Private credit is really just a repackaging of high-yield junk with lighter covenants. It’s basically people who could not qualify for bank lending. They couldn’t pass the loan committee. So they go to a bunch of really bored private equity guys with money burning a hole in their pocket, and they’ll give it to them.
Kevin: Well, yeah. Or they’ll go to a gold dealer that’s willing to pay you 12% on your gold. What’s that look like?
David: I know how cookies on my computer work, so the fact that I’m interested in gold means that I get these advertisements from everybody in the industry, but there’s a U.S. gold dealer paying 12% interest on metals positions, and they’re using the money to then fund processing of metals and jewelry dealers and things like that. I think it’s worth unpacking this very simply, what are they doing? They’re acting as the middleman. And they’re acting as an intermediary, like a bank. If they can pay you 12% for the use of your money, they got to make something on it too, right? Let’s say they make 2 or 3%. So you have someone borrowing money from them for 14, maybe 15%, and this is where, again, people who only focus on returns, not inherent risk, I would describe them as suckers. What is the quality of a loan instrument where the end borrower is paying 12 to 15% today?
When you move from investment grade to non-investment grade, that is, into the high yield or junk category, you go from 5% yields to 6% yields, no big deal. So for a BB rated loan, call it 6%. Then you move lower in quality from BB, move down, say, six notches in quality, and now you’re in CCC. This is like the junky junk. You’ll pay 10.5% on that. That, by the way, CCC, is about four notches above default. So 10.5% is just four notches above a formal default. So somewhere between 10%, and as I mentioned previously, 12 to 15%, there’s your silver sucker and the payment to them flirting with credit quality on par with that of paper that’s near in default. You see what I’m getting at? And people look and say, “Yeah, but I’m buying silver.” No.
Kevin: No, you’re about to lose everything.
David: This is where understanding the nature of the financial markets, understanding bond yields, it actually does matter. And paying attention to risk, it does matter.
What this speaks to is the current conditions within the financial markets. We come full circle to Jerome Powell saying we need to end a tightening cycle. There are investors who can’t help themselves, but send hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars to private credit purveyors in hopes of getting their 10 or 12%, and they don’t realize that what they’re getting is stuff that banks passed on, loan committees passed on, couldn’t get financed any other way, not even as a junk bond. It now has to be done in a private environment where, again, the loan covenants are really not protective at all. Right?
Kevin: So what’s that say? What’s that say?
David: It speaks to the market’s looseness. So in contrast, in contrast, this notion that Jerome Powell is promoting, that we’ve had a very tight financial structure within the marketplace, no, quite the opposite. Markets are very loose. It speaks to current financial conditions, which again, you have speculation in so many areas and no regard for the risks inherent to the market today. It speaks to the investor’s ability to appraise risk. Nobody thinks about risk until they’re losing money. Then they want details, then they want to look at the covenants, but by then? By then it’s too late.
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Kevin: You’ve been listening to the McAlvany Weekly Commentary. I’m Kevin Orrick, along with David McAlvany. You can find us at mcalvany.com, and you can call us at 800-525-9556.
This has been the McAlvany Weekly Commentary. The views expressed should not be considered to be a solicitation or a recommendation for your investment portfolio. You should consult a professional financial advisor to assess your suitability for risk and investment. Join us again next week for a new edition of the McAlvany Weekly Commentary.
