The Conference Board – a nonprofit think tank that delivers cutting edge research – recently published its latest Leading Economic Index (LEI) for the United States.  The findings were a giant bummer.  In December, the LEI dropped for the tenth consecutive month.

From couch surfing to shelters to sleeping on the streets, new research revealed the top US cities with the most homeless Gen-Z youth (aged 18 to 24). 

On January 25, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told journalists in Angola that BRICS, an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, may soon explore the possibility of creating its own currency. What message does this plan send regarding the greenback's dominance?

While delivering a statement after his meeting with Angolan President Joao Lourenco, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov emphasized that the West had shattered vital principles of the inviolability of property, the presumption of innocence, fair competition, and globalization.

In this week’s Live from the Vault, Andrew Maguire reports on the accelerating adoption of a gold benchmark price for silver and commodity trades between nations, while examining the main drivers behind the current gold price rally.

The lifelong wholesaler reflects on the global implications of Russia’s plan to launch its own gold-pegged stablecoin, evaluating its potential to undermine the role of fiat currencies in foreign trade transactions.

It is the miscalculation of this era – one that may begin the collapse of dollar primacy, and therefore, global compliance with U.S. political demands, too. But its most grievous content is that it corners the U.S. into promoting dangerous Ukrainian escalation against Russia directly (i.e. Crimea).

Washington dares not – indeed cannot – yield on dollar primacy, the ultimate signifier for ‘American decline’. And so the U.S. government is hostage to its financial hegemony in a way that is rarely fully understood.

Mississippi residents are consistently told that renewable energy sources, like solar panels, are now the lowest-cost ways to generate electricity, but these claims are based on creative accounting gimmicks that only examine a small portion of the expenses incurred to integrate solar onto the grid while excluding many others.

The harshest winter since 2008 is contributing to shortages of staple vegetables across Central Asia and sending prices north in a region still suffering from COVID-induced food inflation. 

In Uzbekistan, record frosts have highlighted the shortcomings of the national energy system as even residents of the capital spent days on end without power. But the cold has also hammered the agriculture sector in the region’s most populous country.

We have confirmation from the highest sources that Russia and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) are considering using gold for pan-Asian trade settlements, fully replacing dollars and euros.